A Performance Work
Last year my father gave me an envelope with some letters that he and my mother had exchanged during his two-year exile in Mexico, after he had been detained by a military group. After he had been set free, these letters were sent to members on the paternal side of my family: my grandmother Cuca, my grandfather Juanjo and my uncle Jorge. It’s a privilege to be able to read this particular moment in my history and I am glad that my grandmother has conserved these letters which are documents of an era lived by my parents, my siblings and me, far from my family. These letters date back to the month of May in 1977 a few days before my birth, until the month of October in 1979, after my sister, Celeste, had turned a year old in Mexico DF.
Correspondence is a project that attempts to work with these letters as documents, as a register of a particular moment told by the authors. For this project, I took my father’s word and transcribed it with needle and thread on a suit he had used, a suit that due to use had acquired his physical form.
Correspondence is the union of two moments lived by my father: a young man exiled with four children writing from afar and the now-mature man of 57 years who left his mark on this object-suit. I chose a suit because my father uses them everyday for work; it’s his second skin during the days of the week.
Correspondence is related to two different moments in the work. On the one hand, it refers to my previous work at the present time, and on the other hand it grasps the resonance of the words, reread by my mother and worked on by Adrés Asia’s music in the studio, manipulated and interpreted in public presence.
The music is at once a resonant mattress and a discourse; a conceptual work that embraces the act of embroidery.
The intention of this work is to finish, during the different presentations of the performance, a piece of embroidery, so that an “objectual” work endures as a result of the action.
Soledad Sánchez Goldar + Andrés Asia. 2008

Photos: Dolores Esteve (Córdoba,1978)