Allora and calzadilla biography definition

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"Returning a Sound" is an audio echo of the departed soundscape, a celebration of the victory of a civil disobedience movement, and a plea for ecological awareness and development. Testing ceased in May 2003, and the film was made in 2004. Aside from its reflections on Puerto Rico's political situation, the film demonstrates the simplicity and power of a poetic image that resonates with viewers even without knowledge of its social history.

"Wake Up"

"Wake Up" (2007) is a sound and light installation for which the artists invited trumpet players from around the world, working in diverse styles, to interpret "Reveille," a military signal to rouse soldiers.

Pianists take turns performing a segment of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (1824) on a grand piano with the foot pedals reversed and their bodies inserted through a hole cut into the center of the instrument. The void is replaced by the sound of the pianist's fingers striking the keys. The sound, which ranges from an ambulance siren to experimental jazz, is the artist's acoustic marking of areas of the island where explosions once reverberated.

They live and work in Puerto Rico, a place where Caribbean culture intermingles with colonial history and the influence of the United States. Allora and Calzadilla were short-listed for the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize (2006) and have received a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) fellowship for 2008.

More recently, their work has expanded beyond purely human concerns to explore entanglements between human activities and the natural world, engaging with concepts of deep time and ecological transformation.

Allora & Calzadilla's Vieques Series: Art as Witness

Among their most significant bodies of work, the Land Mark series (1999-2010) demonstrates how art can bear witness to ongoing struggles for justice and environmental restoration.

Allora received her Bachelor's degree from the University of Richmond, Virginia (1996) and her Master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003). By drawing historical, cultural, and political metaphors out of basic materials, Allora and Calzadilla’s works explore the complex associations between an object and its meaning.

Major exhibitions include the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2007); Kunsthalle Zurich (2007); Dallas Museum of Art (2006); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (2006); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2004); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2004).

Their work, like the Brazil Futbol artwork, probes the relationship between power structures, cultural artifacts, and natural environments, creating pieces that function simultaneously as aesthetic objects and critical investigations.

Their artistic inquiry centers on what they describe as "the trace," a concept that connects presence with absence, inscription with erasure, preservation with destruction.

Guillermo Calzadilla was born in 1971 in Havana, Cuba. Their work spans sculpture, photography, performance, sound, and video, each medium carefully chosen to amplify their conceptual investigations into colonialism, militarism, and our entangled relationships with the natural world.

Understanding Allora & Calzadilla's Artistic Approach

The collaborative practice of Allora & Calzadilla distinguishes itself through rigorous research combined with bold material experimentation.

You can use an ideological glue.”