Angel memory master5/15/2023 ![]() ![]() Jenny: Aside from Memory of a Time Twice Lived, what other work will be included in the ICA exhibition?Īngel and Valerie: To be brief, as we’d like you to see the show, seven projects and installations will be featured in the second floor galleries, and we will stage one public event on February 24 th at the ICA. We chose to stage the concert in the Wagner’s lecture hall as a way of reviving its history of musical performance and connecting the past with the present, yet in the contemporary cultural form of Norteño music, a style that was not previously heard at the Wagner. This discovery became the peg that connected our practice to the Wagner. Researching through the Wagner’s archives we came across late-19th century programs that highlighted musical and vocal performances in the Wagner’s lecture hall. It was this notion of time or time travel that we wanted to activate in our film. The Wagner’s gallery and lecture hall provoke the feeling of stepping back into the nineteenth century. We were inspired by its mission of providing free scientific education to the public, its history, and the preservation of its displays. Jenny: How did the collaboration with the Wagner Free Institute of Science come to be? Why did you choose to stage the concert there and film in the museum space?Īngel and Valerie: The project initiated with an invitation from Kate Kraczon, Associate Curator of ICA (Philadelphia), who approached us about developing an independent project in Philadelphia, specifically with the Wagner Free Institute of Science. With these ideas in mind, we foresee further research, projects and collaborations.Īngel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere, “Memory of a Time Twice Lived,” production still, 2015 We see the accordion, a mobile instrument, as taking us on a journey through geographic spaces and cultural, economic and political histories. While there we attended the Festival Internazionale Fisarmonica, visited many accordion workshops/factories, interviewed accordion fabricators and specialists, and documented performances of master accordion players participating in the festival. In October of 2009 we traveled to Castelfidardo, Italy, a town that historically was considered to be the world’s accordion capital-in a sense, a town that the accordion built. Having the shared yet varied experience between us provoked further discussions and interest in critically engaging the accordion’s history in relation to industrialization, labor movements, periods of nationalism, folklore, and its current production within post-Fordist globalizing trends. When did you first become interested in the accordion and begin to view it in that way?Īngel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere: The accordion, an instrument associated with numerous immigrant histories and musical forms, was also part of each of our own individual family histories. Jenny Gill: In this project, you use the accordion as a metaphor or focal point to look at cultural and musical migration. Jenny Gill connected with Angel and Valerie to learn more about the new film and the exhibition in Philadelphia. The roots of the film go back to Nevarez and Tevere’s years-long research on the history of the accordion, an instrument they see as a poetic representation of how music and people move through space. Shot on location in Philadelphia and Mexico, the film references Chris Marker’s science fiction piece La Jetée (1962), features a concert arranged for film, and an accordionist performing throughout Philadelphia. The film builds a field of relations tying together 20th-century mythic heroes, the collection of the Wagner Free Institute of Science, the Mexican luchador El Santo and the accordion as a nomadic instrument. Memory of Time Twice Lived is a journey through musical tempo, cinematic time and the excavation of an image. ![]()
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