Julia Aurora Guzmán

How to Hold is an interdisciplinary, site-specific installation that re-contextualizes various dimensions of support systems, as found throughout architecture, methods of display, and mental processes to become a space-holder for narratives, while playing with the dynamics of a "stage" and its spectator space.
The installation consisted of an arrangement of columns that embraced the emptiness within them, awaiting to be activated. Thus, How to Hold invited different artists to collaborate with this space-scape. The exhibit included a story-scape by independent curator Tiago de Abreu Pinto, a light-scape by Dutch artist Nikki Hock, and a sound-scape by American artist David Hopkins. 

Throughout the month and a half of the exhibit's trajectory, temporary narratives were brought by other artists to activate the "stage-like" installation. The first stage-activation was brought by American poet Genine Lentine, with the temporary physical and sound inclusion of her poems Comma and Seven Poses: Drawn from the Model. Her poetry was selected, and visually adapted by Julia Aurora Guzmán, while David Hopkins introduced the recordings to the sound-scape, allowing the spectator to envision them on "stage". 

The second stage activation happened during the finissage, as a performance entitled "Orbiting through the Colonnade" with a collaboration between Spanish artist Javier Murugarren and myself, Julia Aurora Guzmán. Together, we explored the different ways of holding space, each other, and ourselves. We searched for roundedness in the light and heavy, hung and grounded, and honored the birth and end to all cycles, specially for the finissage of How to Hold, where all the works were created with an aesthetic that reflects a body in continuous adaptation, transformation, and gradual understanding.