Esther Planas

Copyright 2023

Eventos y Apariciones en Rojo:

Red events and apparitions, Red spectre and Red ghost: newer projects and retroactive
effects going on across time

In 2008 there was a strength of a feeling for the Red for its meaning and for its internationalism or its
way to appear in as monochrome art and of how the Red spectre was creeping inside my spirit.

There have been many years of quasi amnesia, of hopelessness, and defeat.
Now the red time the red flow will never cease.

A fury before powerlessness in front of the rise of a neoliberal cold Fascism as a mode produced and facilitated neoliberalism, which seemed to implode. Those forces or what is now defined as affects haunted me and the memories of the promise which seemed to have been so defeated, given totality
to a hypocrite form which was blind to fascism.

I worked in Barcelona and Guatemala in 2010 and January 2011, with these Red monochromes of the memory of artist which had co-opted Malevich but had a material, object-like presence which could trigger things.

Those were used as backgrounds about the memories of the thickness of such tragic bloodshed in the Spanish Civil war under the fascist and in Guatemala with the ongoing colonial genocides to its indigenous peoples.

Red is seen as a hopeful colour, as a flowing, and as a convulsive dialectic.

The reference to the Red Event was directly taken from Alain Badiou's Being
and Event, and of how the event will carry a trail and aura too.

To re-call a performance from 1998 and to call those Red spirits, as a way of dissolving as an author and create unexpected encounters and feelings in a series of workshops that will open up perceptions.

A genealogy of Red apparitions:

1) as a thin Redline that was crossing all objects of a dismantled barricade and in the graphics of a publication that was propaganda like.

2) the thin line as blood from the Rojos in the Spanish civil war.

3) the Neo-Concrete internationalist movements, the use of monochrome and the Red as an energetic aural object, like sculptural totems and presences that were surrounding me with the ghost of the artist that had used the Red colour, and of the Red colour transcending arts and gathering its own momentum for a political change.
4) blood indigenous peoples in Guatemala and political resistance victims

5) since the years (2015/16) some artist, activist and theorist have "discovered"
my works on Red and those have been featured in Seattle's Independent space INCA
and within the project, This Might Not Work.

6) I started to make a compilation of references found in the internet or as photos in places and sites.

Text for Red May at INCA Institute
extract:

Red May

Esther Planas Balduz, Felix Gmelin, Talena Lachelle Queen, Clark Wiegman,
RabRab, and Kathleen Skeels
INCA: 2 West Roy St. Seattle, WA, 98110
Exhibition: 28 April – 10 May
Opening: 28 April 7-9pm
Curated by the Red May Collective
_________________________________

Red May launch with an exhibition with work by artists:
Esther Planas Balduz, Felix Gmelin, Talena Lachelle Queen, Clark Wiegman,
RabRab, and Kathleen Skeels.

WE WANT SEATTLE TO TURN RED FOR A MONTH. TO EAT RED FOOD
(APPLES, RED DOTS, RADISHES), TO WEAR RED ACCESSORIES, TO
GET CAUGHT RED-HANDED READING KARL MARX, AND
(WHILE THE WORLD MAXIMIZES HUMAN CAPITAL) TO LIVE PRODIGALLY
IN THE RED AS IF THERE’S NO TOMORROW.
ANYONE CAN PLAY. THE RULES? THERE ARE ONLY TWO. FIRST, RIFF ON RED.
AND SECOND, ASSUME FOR A MONTH THAT THE MARKET IS NOT THE SOLUTION
TO THE PROBLEMS THAT THE MARKET CREATES.
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