WRAP, HISTORY AND SYNCOPE

18 July 1936, Bayonne. Upon hearing the news of the fascist military uprising, Antonia Mercé y Luque, the Spanish dancer and bailaora known as La Argentina, in fatal synchrony with the Second Republic, suffers a syncope and dies.
Isabel de Naverán pursues, in close dialogue with images, the echo of that blow—an individual convulsion that, both representatively and symbolically, contains the collective pain that was approaching and has resonated, at different times and in various forms, through other artists. These include seemingly distant figures such as Japanese choreographers Kazuo Ohno—who felt compelled to revisit his dance fifty years after seeing her perform—Takao Kawaguchi, the bailaora Rocío Molina, and the writer Gertrude Stein.

Isabel de Naverán is an independent research and writer. Her work lies at the intersection between art, contemporary choreography and performance, focused on bodily transmission and the examination of the concept of historical time by way of ephemeral and fugitive practices. She worked as a curator of dance and performance in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid (2017-2024) and has published the books Envoltura, historia y síncope (2021); Wrap, History and Syncope (2024); Ritual de duelo (2022), and La ola en la mente (2024).