"With this project we seek to exacerbate common fantasies outside the imposed ones".

Interview with the Argentinian artist Osías Yanov, who will organise the 'Diversorium, living arts and space for coexistence' in Barcelona in 2022.

With a multidisciplinary practice that combines celebration, installation, sculpture and video, the Argentinean artist, Osias Yanov, is the artist chosen to organise the ‘Diversorium, living arts and conviviality space’, of which we will be announcing dates and venue soon.. Yanov, with an artistic practice that resists the stereotypical control of subjectivity and intersects with queer theory, night parties or group work, is already in the process of production together with the commissioners, Maria Oliver y Antonio Centeno, and the mediator of the Barcelona project, Veronica Valentini. In this interview, conducted from his studio in Buenos Aires, he tells us a little more about how this process is going.

Concomitants: Your work is on the hybrid threshold between performance and sculpture. How do you define your work and what do you pursue through your work?

Osias Yanov: In my work the performative and the interrelation with other collectives is oriented towards perceiving the sensibilities that appear when moving in a group, that is to say, what experiences emerge in a body extended beyond the individual. A development of practices of group association where sometimes the notions of gender, sexuality, class and age are frictioned to become something else.

C: Your practice and the Diversorium have many things in common: the encounter of bodies, the party, the performative, the intersection between different types of beings. How did you receive the invitation from the mediator Vero Valentini to be part of the project? 

OY: This proposal is a continuation of what I have been deepening for a long time: to consider the party as a space of sociability, to celebrate enjoyment, sensuality and sexuality as acts beyond the personal. The party is not an individual ceremony but a public and political possibility, which is generated in a group and which we go through from dissidence as sensitive, transformative acts of refuge.

C: You mentioned that you are used to working and connecting with other bodies, how does this way of working of Concomitentes, based on participation, listening and exchange, inspire you?

OY: A contradictory situation happens to me. On the one hand, I don't feel comfortable in providing a solution to a need through my work. It is a complex figure, however, the idea of placing tools and instruments that I have been developing in dialogue with a community resonates with me.

C: What is it like to socialise these artistic tools for a project like this? 

OY: I think that this is how we understand it from within the project: to socialise tools to facilitate processes. In this project, we all seek to ask ourselves: How can we enable encounters between people with and beyond our structures and diversities? 

C: In this process, how has it been working with such committed and activist commissioners as María Oliver and Antonio Centeno? 

OY: It is an interesting work that interweaves the angles of activism, politics and economics. And that, from an artistic point of view, it can be material for proposing new subjectivities that dismantle that which has been pounded into us as normal and which oppresses us. In this context, the work with Antonio and María is oriented towards seeing what things need to be dismantled and what subjectivities need to emerge in the link created between functional diversity, enjoyment and celebration.

C: As with the project, have you found common ground with them?

OY: We agree that the party, enjoyment, sexuality is a political instance and that it must be placed in the foreground. With this project, we seek to exacerbate fantasies common to all, outside those imposed on us. So this dialogue is set up to make these desires emerge and bring them to a material proposal.

C: What artistic proposal are you working on?

The project became multiple and extensive, including performative encounters, movement practices, sculptural situations and the use of costumes that intensify with the participants.

C: And what is it like to work on a proposal with so many edges, from Argentina and with such tight deadlines?

OY: I prefer projects that are not eternal. That propose simultaneity of actions and not centres. That traffic information between different latitudes. 

C: How will you manage the logistical management of the artistic production while you are in Argentina?

OY: It is precisely these days that I am working on that agenda. For practical reasons certain pieces and even some small general rehearsals will be done in Buenos Aires. I'm going to travel a month before the festival to get closer to the space and define who I'm going to work with.

C: Are you excited to have your work seen across the pond?

OY: At first I was quite scared, because of the scale of the event, which went from being a party to a festival, and the complexity that we assumed when we understood that we wanted to break the hierarchy of the stage with respect to that of the stalls. Unifying everything in the same choreographic event and the meaning between above and below. The actions of this work are situated at the intersection between stage and public space.

C: And how to achieve that through a work of art?

OY: There is something of a celebration of interdependence that I would like to see happen and that we will practice through the use of costumes, objects and movements that sensitise and sensualise the connections between bodies. 

C: It seems a challenge to bring together these common fantasies, these dreams, and turn them into something material?

OY: There are many layers to this project, from the ease of access to the arrival at a party to how we live in it. I think it is important to approach this space from the point of view of desire. 

C: Could you explain a little more about how you use these explorations of sexuality within art?

OY: Trying to overthrow the “normal” is always an annoying job, because those of us who consider ourselves subalterns do so from the position of not wanting to be that “normal”, at the same time as we are singled out for being "normal". This kind of social repression, among others, shrinks our bodies. Exploring sexuality physically or conceptually through practices, exercises, games, skins, performances or forms of contact conspires against normativity and allows the irruption of other imaginaries in which to make room.