Miguel Ventura Civic Songs

Project curated by Juan de Nieves
Civics Songs is the latest project created by NILC, a complex platform conceived by the artist Miguel Ventura in the mid 1990s, from which he builds and provides visibility to his artistic project. NILC (New Interterritorial Language Committee) is a sort of parallel and cryptic universe, whose origin would be a pseudo-mythology dreamt up and embodied by Ventura himself, giving rise to a new language and writing system as well as to a parodic, verbose and elated literature. The references used in the creation of this dense fictional apparatus range from historical events with a special attention to World War II and the holocaust, the contributions of psychoanalysis, to formats used by popular culture such as cinema, television or music, among others.

Throughout these last ten years, NILC has generated a comprehensive body of work spanning literature, music, exhibitions and the performing arts, closely tied in to the site in which each one of the events are held. That is the case of the latest instalment conceived by NILC/Miguel Ventura for the Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló. With the title Civic Songs, the project is organised on three levels or readings, in turn corresponding to the distribution of the EACC. The first level is located on the gallery’s ground floor, with two choirs: one of 20 children from the city’s Music Conservatory, and another choir of 20 adults. Each group will sing a repertoire of 12 songs specifically arranged for this project by the Mexican composer Alejandra Hernández. Both choirs, accompanied by an orchestral formation, will sing from mobile stands, moving longitudinally on either of the two sides of the museum, and will perform on the opening day of yhe exhibition plus at other moments, to be determined, during the course of the project. For the second element, the central structure of the exhibition space has been conceived as a large chrysalis with a number of formal devices unfolding inside it, the habitual elements in NILC presentations: labyrinths, cages, oilcloth mural installations, paintings, documents, decorative elements, video screens, etc. This central cell overflows towards the outside of the museum, at the same time functioning as the main access to the gallery. At the same time, a whole series of videos are projected from this central structure onto the side walls of the room, providing views of the activities of a colony of rats living in captivity.

The habitat for the rats is precisely the third element of the project which. The rats were trained by professionals from the Facultad de Psicología at the Universidad Autónoma de México, under the supervision of Professor Hugo Sánchez Castillo and with the collaboration of a team of psychologists and veterinaries in what amounts to a pioneering art-science collaborative project. That colony embody a kind of “brain” determining the entrances, rhythms and pauses of the songs performed by the two choirs. In this way, through a number of electromechanical and computerised systems, the rats will control the movement of the choirs, the songs and the order in which they will be sang. The rats were surveyed and recorded through a system of cameras and monitors, allowing the public to see them only on the large video screens placed on the side walls of the museum.