MARC BEHRENSA Magnet Between Proteins and Sugar

There is a genealogy that unites the exhibition "A Magnet Between Proteins and Sugar” by Marc Behrens which opened on the 27th of February – a lineage with familiar, artistic and musical elements. They produce what we can designate as a politic of bodies, images and sounds. There is also another dimension: the one that comes from expeditions in nature and to symbolically relevant locations. The path originates in Germany and follows mainly the footsteps of the author’s parents. Memories from a time marked by wars - the Second and the Cold which came afterwards - are evoked. There are espionage stories and dreams left unfulfilled. Then come the first contacts with art: Beuys’ Darmstadt and also Cage’s, artists with whom the city sought to reconcile: a world of flux, a new music. Nothing would ever be as before: art created by all, heir to Duchamp and Satie.

One has to follow the lines, to untangle them afterwards: torture-performances, animal art, guerilla acts. We are in between two falls: a wall and two towers, twin by chance. And there, in that timeframe, other wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Middle East. A continuous stream of noise from missiles and virtual images. The whole in perpetuous acceleration, here and there interrupted by the intensity generated in squares or streets (Tahir, Syntagma, Wall Street), in the spectral polyphony of the Amazon forest and in the vacuum of the desert. Meanwhile, visual pieces, graphics and sound works come in quick succession. Never abandoning the magnetic tape and cut-up techniques the digital also crawls in through compositions generated by computer of which the recent release with Atom™ constitutes one example: a work constructed from 1987 to 2013, where multiple musical genres coexist: from techno to concrete music, from songs to field recordings and from noise to electronics.

In "A Magnet Between Proteins and Sugar" we will revisit the path of Marc Behrens through works and documents rescued from his personal archive. Cassettes from the 80s – produced in DIY fashion with photocopy techniques – collages, limited editions, posters, graphic works, concrete, abstract and informal experiments, musical scores, rituals and evocations of travels and personal stories. A span of 30 years that encompasses many more, so many are the times summoned in the exhibition, concert and audition that will pass through Sismógrafo rooms. And if montage and editing are constant processes in the work of this author one can also say that this procedures serve precisely to dismantle, deregulate and unbalance the senses and perceptions in a kind of <i>ars combinatoria</i> formed by elements gathered throughout decades in a life where encounters, discoveries and ghosts keep accumulating: Joseph Beuys, Cecil Taylor, Naked City, William Burroughs, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ho. Turner, Chris Keller...

The exhibition opened on the 27th of February until the 14th of March. On the Saturday after the opening, the 28th of February, the concert “Rita Braga & Marc Behrens Smile you against the wall” took place. And finally, on Saturday, the 14th of March, a special audition of a sound piece by Marc Behrens closed the exhibition.