Latest Convention Breakers, Pil&Galia, 42 maalot, July 2002
Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman, members of the group Sala-Manca, immigrated to Israel from Buenos Aires seven years ago. Since then, they managed to produce some multidisciplinary and multilingual performances, to display some exhibitions, to set up the art magazine “Hearat Shulaym”, and to organize some of the most interesting artistic events of the year…Sergei Eisenstein considered cinema as an art that would free the latent strength by creating a united collective conscience that would allow the public to experience the channel as if it was one single man…Without drowning their public, Rotman and Mauas succeed in raising questions about the ability of the public to experience a revolutionary instant, refined like the one Sergei Eisenstein talked about…Their affection for the proud and revolutionary modernism of the beginning of the 20’s century is reflected in all their works, from “Potiomkin Village” to “Hearat Shulaym” and a cultural avant-garde Yiddish evening, even through the conception of an exhibition of fax works made of ephemeral thermal paper…
The following scene, taken from one of their performances, illustrates best the cat and mouse game that Rotman and Mauas run with modernism: on the ground of a big black and white slide, of two “sticks players” and a square pixel ball, Rotman declares “Delgado and Borges play tennis in Wimbledon” and erases in a second all what extends between “the garden of the divided paths” and the Atari. Something in that humor and in their readiness to integrate in their work a reference to their immediate environment, in their ability to break the abysmal seriousness that froze the dada, the surrealism, and the futurism into the glass of the museum, raises the suspicion that their faithfulness is divided.
The following scene, taken from one of their performances, illustrates best the cat and mouse game that Rotman and Mauas run with modernism: on the ground of a big black and white slide, of two “sticks players” and a square pixel ball, Rotman declares “Delgado and Borges play tennis in Wimbledon” and erases in a second all what extends between “the garden of the divided paths” and the Atari. Something in that humor and in their readiness to integrate in their work a reference to their immediate environment, in their ability to break the abysmal seriousness that froze the dada, the surrealism, and the futurism into the glass of the museum, raises the suspicion that their faithfulness is divided.
