Juan Miranda: PATHOS

Juan Miranda’s work sits in the intersection between theatre, visual arts and performance. His artistic research investigates the ephemeral body of emotions, images and flesh and the tension created between action and space.

PATHOS is a four hour-long durational piece, in which the audience is welcome to circulate between three spaces. The spectators can come and go and find their room to share and open up experiences together in each space. 

Who are we becoming when we are no longer close to the people who seem to define us? What does it mean to feel absence? What does it mean to feel in isolation and togetherness? How to expose a personal and intimate universe without being autobiographical or auto referential? How to make a contact that is dense even without touching?

PATHOS is performative installation as concrete and material as it is virtual, from which I can summon my mother and my loved ones whom I have not been able to hug, touch and laugh with for a long time. 

An expanded choreography among the living and the dead. Traces, ghosts, absence. A relationship that disappears, an ephemeral celebration.

How is affection being produced and transmitted in today’s digital environments? Invoking the genre of love songs, this work questions the status of intimacy and emotion in a state of emergency and urgency.

Through remote rehearsals with non-professional performers, such as elderly and teenage relatives, This is not just another love song delves into the tension between real emotions and feelings as fetish commodities. When we show our emotions, we expose ourselves by adopting a vulnerable position. We show our weakness, and we reveal something we cannot wholly control because emotions can be both passive and uncontrollable. But, in a more or less conscious way, we also play and manipulate this. The expression of feelings is always an active movement.

15 min colour / Netherlands, Argentina / Spoken languages: Spanish / Subtitles: English

Director: Juan Miranda 
Editing: Bruno Zaffora 
With: Antonia Marquez, Gabriela Ainstein, Mirta Bosisio, Juan Carlos Miranda. 
Thanks: Marjorie Boston, Edit Kaldor, Constanza Aguirre, Juan Martin Loustau, María García Vera, Astrid Albiso, Mazlum Nergiz & DAS Theatre. 

A formal and thematic continuation of This is not just another love song, this video installation in the making focuses on interviews with my teenage relatives about sexuality and love. As a reference, I will work with the Pier Paolo Pasolini documentary Comizi d'amore (1964).

Juan Miranda’s work sits in the intersection between theatre, visual arts and performance. His artistic research investigates the ephemeral body of emotions, images and flesh and the tension created between action and space.

Photos of PATHOS, by Thomas Lenden

Share