ÖFTS: Meatball nº 3, by Julia Coelho and Renan Araujo
Within the programming of
Acento 2022| Duration: | 8 hours |
A fragment from the work Meatball Curtain (for R.Crumb) by artist Öyvind Fahlström has been left behind in a box at the back of a lorry.
Now that some works that were on gratuitous loan in the MACBA collection have left Spain, Meatball nº 3 is trying to make contact through radiophonic space twenty years after their last public appearance at an exhibition in Barcelona. It wants to return to its post with the other members of the curtain. What will happen to our hero? Through a whispered monologue, Meatball nº 3 reveals aspects of its life, its elastic energy and its relationship with the museums through which it passed.
Meatball Curtain (for R.Crumb) from 1969 references a comic by the underground artist Robert Crumb about a supernatural event: “Meatballs fall from the sky. In the comic, those who are struck by a meatball are transformed, they experience an epiphany of something like inner happiness. Revelation [...],” says Fahlström.
One of the premises of Fahlström’s poetics is the manipulation and theatricality of elements and images in painting, language, music, performance and poetry. The artist wanted to demonstrate that the world can be manipulated by anyone, and that it is founded on participation and play, perspectives based on his “game theories”.
Meatball nº 3 is the first act of ÖFTS, a puppet show that narrates a manipulated biography of Meatball Curtain (for R.Crumb), the work by the Swedish-Brazilian artist Öyvind Fahlström that was on gratuitous loan in the MACBA collection between 2006 and 2021.
Meatball nº 3 can be heard on La Casa Encendida Radio during Festival Acento 2022.
Julia Coelho was born in Salvador de Bahía, Brazil, in 1990 and Renan Araujo in Santa Rita do Passa Quatro, Brazil, in 1987. They have lived and worked in Barcelona since 2019. Julia has a degree in Fine Art from São Paulo University and a master’s in History of Science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Renan followed the Independent Studies Programme at MACBA and is currently doing a master's in Sound Art at Barcelona University. Interested in the performative nature of living and dead subjects, museum collections and toxic substances, they have been working as a curatorial duo since 2013. Through intersections between magical and ecological thinking, the arts and sciences, they explore biography as a literary genre that recognises the history and power of objects and forms of life that are understood to have no agency.
