I believe that a revolution can start from this single straw.
At first glance, this rice straw seems light and insignificant.
We can hardly believe that it can spark a revolution.
But I was able to understand the weight and power of this straw.
(FUKUOKA, Masanobu, The Revolution of a Straw, 1975)
Straw is matter, it is a singular word but which carries collective in its importance and functionality. It is a transient, migrating and even an omnipresent matter. The straw material encompasses human being in the shape of a house or ceiling, or winds out our sweats as fans in humid environments. Straw also protects us from the sun in the shape of a hat. It can turn into rapid fire and expand. It inhabits the stomach of the cow, which eats and digests two it or three times. Straw is and is handled in different parts of the world, it is malleable, intense and discreet.
The straw is feast, dance and mystery. The matter of straw is trans, interactive, expansive, enthusiastic. It is dry matter, it is the other state of the cereal that turns all the time into basic necessities or ornaments.
A pile of straw is a place to loose identity or whatever the object, especially when it covers the body, or part of it, or when it fills the space. It clings to the wind, to the kinetics of the gesture. Matter that flies and drags the earth and raises dust at the same time.
Two bodies (Juliana Notari and Laura Corcuera) mixing their action tools (performative arts, audiovisual, journalistic, geographic, scenic and puppetry languages) to propose a public festive game whose continuation will be known in the continuous present of a straw facility, an almost haystack. Several cosmovisions of the existence investigated in several periods of residence.
The amplified gesture that resides in the countryside life, from Asia to the Americas, passing through the fields of Europe, one of separating the straw from the grain. In this gesture lives and inhabits many of the bodies that feed, in the world. Straw is considered a secondary element to the grain, as something useless, unimportant. But its existence and use is equally in importance to living matter.
In this relationship between straw and grain lies the eternal dilemma between background and form, between death and life, between reality and fiction or even between value and price. There is a great difference between the rural and urban discourse in relation to this matter, infinitely used by autochthonous peoples in rituals, architecture, such as protection and clothing.
The nomadism of straw integrates, interacts, and makes equal relationships. Matter carries within itself something primitive of the wild shelter, of the search for elements that nature presents and turns it into protection against rain, cold, and wind. Straw is in a dry, golden, light, near-dead state.
Work the straw movement, DANCE THE STRAW FOR THE WORLD, give anima and action to all the ancestral charge of this matter spread on the planet. Rice, wheat, rye, corn, palm… each home with its straw, or straws, the individual straw of each being, and the straw of the two artists. Perhaps we are particles of all this moving straw that is inside the belly of a cow, or in a state of home, or in the head of a Guarani Indian.
The straw is traffic. It is the portal between life and death. It is essential to understand the networks and primordial social networks. In the straw dwells a set of gestures for the corporal decolonization, and its origin and history is in the iris of your eyes.
Party, fun, nerves, joy, disinhibition, excesses, changes, travel, community, affectation. Where’s the straw, where’s the party? Thinking clown. Find a needle in a haystack. Horse thinking. Let’s go to the haystack, let’s go to the party: two women. It can be a mental and somatic straw: A physical, sexual, pleasant straw. “What a fuck we made that party”. The holiday is the collective time and space for revelation.
What happens after a meeting? What happens from a look? What is the first spark of the will to create together?
Laura Corcuera (Zaragoza, 1979) and Juliana Notari (Sao Paulo, 1980) met in the Sierra Norte region of Madrid, Southern Europe, in a rural, committed, loving and generous environment in Braojos de la Sierra, in a village of 100 inhabitants. These two beings cherish and value diverse sensibilities, vulnerabilities, displacement throughout the world, interdependence and personal autonomy. They imagine and desire the transoceanic, intercontinental, interterritorial creative process. LA PAJA is an artistic investigative process that will take place during periods of rural, wild and research residences.