Alejandra Salinas & Aeron Bergman

Lampo is pleased to bring Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman from Spain for two nights of folklore and fantasy—and four multimedia works.

On Friday they perform Scotch Monsters, a piece about monsters, elves and fairies made from sound recordings and video collected in Scotland… then Bousha and Juanita, with music by Alejandra, Aeron, Bousha (Aeron’s grandmother) and Juanita (Aeron’s guitar) and video footage of suburban knick-knackery.

On Saturday they present Underwater Villages, a sound and video work about real and imagined places in northern Spain… then Salinas and Bergman premiere a new piece called Just This One Day, made over four years. A & A in their Chicago debut.

Alejandra Salinas (b.1977, Logroño, Spain) and Aergon Bergman (b.1971, Detroit, Mich.), a married couple who work together under the moniker Alejandra & Aeron, are based in La Rioja, Spain. They capture everyday sounds, using a recorder the way a camera captures images. Sheep bells, clips of family dialogue or a song sung at a friend’s wedding—all form part of the snapshots of daily Riojan life.

However, their work is not pure documentary, but instead a creative response to sound. Samples from their source recordings are manipulated, looped and combined with ambient drones, digital edits and electronic textures.

They have shown their work internationally at such institutions as the Kitchen, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Museum of New Art, Detroit; Museum of Modern Art, Strasbourg; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg; Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Ex Teresa Center for Contemporary Art, Mexico City. Together they run the Lucky Kitchen label with releases by Joshua Abrams, Toshiya Tsunoda, Stephan Mathieu and others. Salinas and Bergman received the 2002 Award of Distinction from Ars Electronica for The Tale of Pip.

Support provided by the Instituto Cervantes