MARIO DE VEGA (MX, 1979)
Residency period: October 2019 – February 2020
Sonority, presence and invisibility are starting points of Mario de Vega’s artistic work and research. His practice addresses questions and issues that could be called “productive destabilization” by evoking situations, through which the viewer can come to realise fundamental things known subconsciously. Ambivalences between processes and results, between the obvious and the unknown.
His work explores the tension between documentation and performativity, addressing aural activity visually. Photographic documentation, video, objects, remains of actions, events, and situations producing ambiguous relations between objects and spaces, utilising the context to explore the value of fragility and indetermination, assuming the impossibility of control, leaving space to the exploration and reflection about what is unpredictable. His performances are live actions are both improvisational and contingent. The documentation of those multiple effects constitutes the nuanced aspect of his practice. In the studio, de Vega develops modes of presentation for pieces that are otherwise not amenable to a more traditional art context, like the gallery or museum.
Mario de Vega’s mentorship at ECAL with BA Fine Arts and Media & Interaction Design students resulted in the exhibition presented during Art Genève 2019: INTERFERENCES – Forty-Four Excuses for Participation and a Zero. Through a conceptual approach to sound, this exhibition proposes a scenario in which the eye takes the role of the ear, and vice versa. Within the notion of “Aural Vision”, the presented works result from a short seminar that served as an introduction to a larger educative experience which aims to extend collaborations between Media & Interaction Design and Fine Arts, using sound as a bridge.
His residency at La Becque also allowed him to work on several art works presented at LUFF, Lausanne, Gaité Lyrique, Paris, Cave 12, Geneva and Berghain, Berlin.
El Intruso. Monologue for silence, designed clothes and embroidered symbology.
Performed by Mathilde Invernon
LUFF Festival 2019, Casino de Montbenon. Lausanne, Switzerland
Photo credits: Romain Gapany, Vincent Petitpierre and Max Jacot