La Ribot
La Ribot at Palazzo Grassi
La Ribot and Asier Puga present the performance Juana Ficción at Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection.
La Ribot and Asier Puga present Juana ficción at Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
On the occasion of Tatiana Trouvé’s exhibition at Palazzo Grassi, choreographer, dancer and artist La Ribot presents her performance Juana ficción (2024) in the museum’s atrium, in collaboration with Spanish conductor Asier Puga and with original music by Iñaki Estrada. The scope of this work extends beyond both the physical space in which it unfolds and the themes it addresses: an intoxicating, fragile concert that moves between dance and music, light and darkness.
Juana ficción (2024) is dedicated to Joanna I of Castile, Queen of Castile and Aragon in the sixteenth century, who was imprisoned for more than forty years on account of her alleged madness. Rather than offering an idealised portrayal of her life, the performance by La Ribot with Juan Loriente focuses on the manipulation and erasure of official history of which Joanna I of Castile was a victim, and reflects on what her mental universe might have been like, set apart from the world, in the relentless repetition of identical days.
In tribute to the queen’s taste for the musical innovations of her time, Juana ficción (2024) brings early music together with contemporary electronic music, creating a dialogue between dance and music, technology and history.
This sound and visual experience reveals the fate of Joanna of Castile, a modern woman trapped, whose impossible escape would go on to inspire stories throughout history. La Ribot tells her story through movement, in an exceptional scenographic and solar cycle. Drawing on a video of her 1991 piece El triste que nunca os vido, which also refers to the queen, the work captures the abyss of time and its imprint on the body.
A narrative suspended in time through music and dance, the piece carries the idea of an ephemeral present, of a passage from day to dusk, from splendour to oblivion.
