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Issue 32

Character
Welcoming a New Character Why We Got Into Character Character and Composition, A Response The Space of Representations Character Plotting Michael Meredith Wants to Be Horizontal and Fuzzy Assemblages of Ordinary Life Growing up Modern: A Family Story Micro-Modifications: Stories of Dingbat Dwellers The Classy Order Playing With Paint and Space Looking to Introduce Something Inconvenient Legendary Acts Dead Ringers Getting Cute Makin’ It My Dad is Better Than Yours: Exclusive Behind-the-Scenes Interviews with Three Shortlisted Contestants at the 9th Annual Architecture Awards Alma de Rímel & The Glammatics Character and the Character Breaking Bad: When Architecture is Turned into a Criminal Character and Cities of To-morrow I on the Streets Drawing Soane’s Is Romanticism Alive and Well and Living in America? Construction of an Architect The Forensic Criticism of N. Ratsby in The Architectural Review Lequeu’s Characters Introducing the Black Bird

Project

Alma de Rímel & The Glammatics

September 14, 2020

Alma de Rímel & The Glammatics is a concert by Maria Jerez (aka Alma de Rímel) accompanied by The Glammatics (aka Elii). This concert produces music from the creation of images. While an image is constructed, the sounds are produced. This synesthetic relation creates the base for the lyrics of the songs.

Contributors

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Maria Jerez – Alma de Rimel & The Glammatics. © SZENE Salzburg / Bernhard Müller.

Alma de Rímel (Soul of Mascara) is a fictional character, a glam star, dissolved in a shiny glam stage. The Glammatics are material fictional characters that belong to the scenography. Together they become a glam band that performs a concert, producing music from the creation of images. A concert where explosions become songs, actions become notes, objects become choirs.

Alma de Rímel & The Glammatics deploy in long eyebrows, impossible makeup, transformable suits, “spikey” forms and objects, mirrored surfaces, velvet, leopard, fake marble, fluorescent tubes, red leather, plastic, glitter, golden lacquer, air, and pink steel. . . . The boundaries between them disappear, provoking a synesthetic relationship using its own Glammatics: a choreography of things and characters, a glam landscape where objects, bodies, images, sounds, and voices are no longer identified as separated entities.

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  1. Unmentionable. The idea of the piece is to activate a concert from the unknown. The Glammatics absorb “Alma the Rímel’s” aesthetics and deploy it in some “difficult to name” elements.
  2. Glam. A glam concert is not only listened to, it is also looked at and touched. Glam is, in itself, a synesthetic proposal.
  3. Synesthesia. Objects that sound, but they do not sound to what they should sound, instruments that do not do what they seem to do, a concert enabled with birthday cards, sprays, lipstick fingers, spikey objects, and sexy materials that accompany Alma de Rímel onstage.
  4. Scale. The Glammatics are neither large nor small. They configure a system of relations in which the rest of Alma de Rímel’s elements assemble.
  5. Jigsaw. The Glammatics fit together, defining a trunk puzzle. In its interior, it holds/accommodates the rest of the set objects, during displacement/removals.
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Maria Jerez – Alma de Rimel & The Glammatics. © elii.

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Maria Jerez – Alma de Rimel & The Glammatics. © SZENE Salzburg / Bernhard Müller.

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Maria Jerez – Alma de Rimel & The Glammatics. © Imagen Subliminal (Miguel de Guzman + Rocío Romero).

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Maria Jerez – Alma de Rimel & The Glammatics. © Imagen Subliminal (Miguel de Guzman + Rocío Romero).

The commission of this collaboration arose in 2015 at the invitation of the curator and art critic Iván López Munuera to participate in the “The Dark Side of the Party” inauguration, part of the festival SOS4.8. The project was installed in the space “Sticky Airs,” designed by C+Architects. Since then, The Glammatics have been touring with Alma the Rímel in their concerts in Murcia, Spain (SOS4.8), Salzburg, Austria (Szene Salzburg), Vienna, Austria (Imagetanz 2016—Brut), Madrid, Spain (Living Room Festival 2017), Hamburg, Germany (Sommerfestival), and Barcelona, Spain (BACANAL SÂLMON<).

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Maria Jerez – Alma de Rimel & The Glammatics. © Imagen Subliminal (Miguel de Guzman + Rocío Romero).

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Maria Jerez – Alma de Rimel & The Glammatics. © SZENE Salzburg / Bernhard Müller.

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Maria Jerez – Alma de Rimel & The Glammatics. © SZENE Salzburg / Bernhard Müller.

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Maria Jerez – Alma de Rimel & The Glammatics. © Rania Moslam.

Data

Area: 30 m2, 0.6 m3 (folded)
Year: 2015
Location: Barcelona, Hamburg, Kortrijk, Madrid, Murcia, Salzburg, and Vienna

Credits

Alma de Rímel: María Jerez
The Glammatics (portable set for Alma de Rímel): elii (Uriel Fogué, Eva Gil, and Carlos Palacios)
Collaborators: elii (Ana López and Claire Laborde)
Costumes for Alma de Rímel: Jorge Dutor
Web for Alma de Rímel: Fernando Giménez
Coproduction of Alma de Rímel: Kunstencentrum BUDA, Teatro Pradillo
Curator of “The Dark Side of The Party”: Iván López Munuera
Production of “The Dark Side of The Party”: SOS4.8
Carpentry: Alfredo Merino Caldas

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Contributor Bios

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Maria Jerez

Maria Jerez is a Madrid-based artist whose work travels between cinema, choreography, architecture, and visual arts. Since 2004, she has made pieces that explore the relationship with the viewer as the space in which the modes of representation are put into crisis. From El Caso del Espectador to her latest pieces Blob and Yabba, this relationship has mutated from a place of “understanding” of theatrical and cinematographic conventions, that is, from the expertise, to the intentional loss of references where the artist, the piece, and the spectator behave towards each other as strangers.

elii

elii is a Madrid-based architecture practice founded in 2006 that specializes in design and construction management. Its founding partners and current directors are the architects Uriel Fogué Herreros, Eva Gil Lopesino, and Carlos Palacios Rodriguez, all of whom have previously worked in internationally renowned architecture firms. The office’s work spans a wide field—from infrastructural projects, urban development, individual and collective housing to ephemeral architecture, exhibition design, and collaborations with artists. Elii took part in the Spanish Pavilion at the XV Venice Architecture Biennale (awarded with the Golden Lion 2016). Among other awards, Elii’s work was selected for The European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture–Mies van der Rohe Award in 2015 and won de FAD Award (Opinion) in 2005.