Anormalmag: A commentary on Memory Root Light by prof. Marta Pérez Ibañez


Anormalmag is an amazing alternative magazine looking for the latest trends,
craving for the innovative and adventurous breakthroughs in culture and in tendencies.

They just published an interview with  LRM Locus by Anna Roig
which includes this text by proffesor Marta Pérez Ibañez
on her experience viewing our latest work, Memory Root Light.
Here is the commentary.


LRM Performance and Memory Root Light: 
A unique experience

by Marta Pérez Ibáñez -  Original (en Español) published here  




Interdisciplinarity is one of the highlights of this new century's Art. The artist holds, dominates different disciplines and makes them live together, dialogue, complete and supplement one another, rounding up a polyhedric work of art which often provides multiple views. Combining disciplines, giving useful means for functions different to those intended for in the first time, new possibilities for materials and resources, all this providing intertwining and overlapping elements. Thus, the XXI century art work becomes a sum up  of associated works of art,  ingredients that together have a meaning, but are equally consistent individually, without loosing their identity.

My acquaintance with performance as an artistic discipline was very early, but also quite infrequent in the last two decades. In the late '80s I had the chance to see my first performance in a small space near Saint John the Divine, that strange "Bread and Puppet" Emergency Exit Circus displayed for a diverse group of art students who experienced that kind of work for the first time. The scenery, theater, improvisation and audience interaction automatically reminded me of the Dada soirées at Cabaret Voltaire, mixed with a certain Fluxus violence.

Impossible to remain aside, impossible not to participate, not to experience it. I admit my life was not the same after that New York afternoon. Since then, I attended performances as varied as the artists who made them, from visceral and cathartic exhibitions of public intimacy to abstract stagings without words and without empathy. I confess all of them were in my mind when I responded to the invitation to attend LRM Performance's Memory Root Light , I was guided just by my curiosity, expecting something I did not even know what would it be like. I did not know Berta and David in person, something that made my journey to their studio some kind of blind initiation trip. An Orpheus going through Hades with his eyes closed.

 What I found there was not only warmth in the reception, but into all I expected. We were a small group of art related people but no artists so that our vision of the work would not be conditioned by our own creation. A spectacularly well designed space, consistent, professional. And there started the evolution of the elements making up this interdisciplinary performative work.

Music, light, space, bodies moving slowly, diverse elements like sculptures, like installations interacting with the bodies and modifying the scenery itself.

I could imagine, or allow suggestions, even be carried away by the senses, by elicitation, by symbolism, by associations of images. I could also experience contradictory feelings, take what was happening to my emotional terrain, create my own history, but for me it was not like that.

In my case, I watched and enjoyed it as an artwork is to be seen and enjoyed: leaving room between me and the work which allows me to make the best of it. You could argue that the experience of Memory Root Light was more scenic than artistic, but it would not be quite appropriate. Especially since the most interesting part of the performance itself came afterwards, when talking to the artists and getting to know  the elements conforming the work from the inside.

LRM is as multidisciplinary as the works they realize, and that becomes evident when talking to them. The meticulous care with which the music and light go together matches the delicacy of the installations the performers rely on and the exquisite taste of their movements, so close to dance.
We then understand their success in presenting their projects. Some of us who got together that afternoon –for we had not met before at all– have met again and discussed our attendance at LRM Locus' studio : Also then, for all of us, the experience was unique.

Marta Pérez Ibáñez
Professor of Art market at the Antonio de Nebrija University and the Instituto Nebrija de Competencias Profesionales Institute. 
Art Consultant at ARTEblanco