Irene Cortés & Magnus Aronson
Irene Cortés is a Canadian artist based in Toronto. A published children’s book author, her books have been distributed in Asia, and her plays have been produced in theaters across South Korea and China. In 2012, Cortés premiered her first opera, a 5-hour piece commissioned by Urban Space Gallery for Nuit Blanche, Toronto. Her films and performances have been exhibited in venues such as Spin Gallery (Toronto), Fundació Suñol (Barcelona), RufXXX (Seoul), Platoon Kunsthalle (Berlin) and Dieselverkstaden (Sweden). Her current work reassembles film and opera productions, using these to build vernacular architecture and renewable energy infrastructures in developing communities.
Born in Mora, Sweden, and currently based in Stockholm and London, Magnus Aronson- Aminoff is a filmmaker and musician. Together with Anthony Bannwart, he founded the video art project Tempography, which has been exhibited in galleries in Europe and Eastern Asia. He co-wrote and starred in Laurin Federlein’s experimental feature film Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness. He continues to collaborate with Irene Cortés. At the moment he is working on a script for a feature film project, Eurogirl, expected to premiere in 2015.
Project: Thinking Utopia – Creating Sustainable Culture by Irene Cortés in collaboration with Magnus Aronson.
During their residency at CeRCCa, Irene Cortés and Magnus Aronson worked on a research project based on the possibilities of developing permanent film sets for the film Nowhere Here Now. Nowhere Here Now is a sci-fi family adventure set in TRON-O, an ecological utopia where all the children have mysteriously fallen asleep. The film follows the mother of the only child left awake. When her child suddenly disappears, she sets out on a quest to find her missing child, and in doing so, discovers the root of TRON-O’s great suffering.
Their aim was to investigate the possibilities of creating permanent sets based on the restoration of decaying Pedra Seca buildings, the so-called barraques, by means of equipping them with solar panels that would make them usable for the community. The process of research included interviews to local winery owners, pedra seca experts and the coordinators of the local magazine of La Bisbal del Penedes El Marge. They also developed a workshop in collaboration with the Artist in Residency CaCis Centre d’Art Contemporani i Sostenibilitat El Forn de Calç.
aronson-aminoff.com