LungA School: Week 2: The Titanic Issue

Shan: Hello world, we’re live on Seydisfjörður Community Radio doing an interview today with Claire, Shan and Marta Moreno Muñoz. Marta is visiting LungA this week as a workshop instructor, and we’re going to ask her a few questions about her practice. Welcome Marta, thank you for joining us.

Marta: Hello, thank you for inviting me.

Claire: My first question was about your first experience of performance art, and what was your introduction to the medium.

M: I started doing performances at the age maybe of eighteen years old.

I had a background in experimental theatre, physical theatre, and then I studied fine arts, and when I started doing my thing everybody was referring me to ‘performance art’. I didn’t know what it was actually, back then. So since then my practice has been focused on action and video performance.

But if I recall my first memories I think I was performing when I was a child already. I have some kind of private experiences which I can now frame into actions like this.

C: Can you tell us a little bit about those?

M: Well, the simple action we have all experienced maybe — turning in circles until you get dizzy and you really dissolve yourself — I think this is a very universal experience. I’ve worked with that idea and that physical experience afterwards in my practice, but I think I’ve lived it since I was very very little.

C: This morning you showed us a series of videos including one of you, turning over and over in a circle — can you tell us the name of it again?

M: In Girum Imus Nocte C: And could you tell us a little bit about the background of that work?

M: Yeah. The title comes from a Latin verse, which is, In Girum Imus Nocte.

It’s actually a palindrome, which can be read in both directions equally: “In Girum Imus Nocte e et consumimur igni” which means “Turning in circles at night and we are consumed by fire.” The physical action of turning inside the bathtub until I get really exhausted is just a mechanism for me to enter into a trance. So for me the work is not just what you see, it’s more the inner mental experience which I am always trying to achieve, since my early works until now. Through that trance I can really expand myself and feel more connected with everything. It’s a very universal peak experience which