Aeon De La Cruz
Aeon De La Cruz is an interdisciplinary artist born and currently living in Miami, Florida. De La Cruz began formally studying art and architecture at DASH, and continued at Cooper Union's architecture program in 2012. His practice has involved a range of mediums including drawing/painting, sculpture, performance/dance, photography, video, and sound/music.
De La Cruz has been recognized by Scholastics and received scholarships to study at CCA’s summer program and The Oxbow School in Napa,CA during his visual art studies, and is a YoungArts alumnus in Visual Arts. He has trained with Alma Dance Theater under the direction of Marissa Alma Nick, Thomas Armour Youth Ballet, and attended intensives such as Greedy Pumpkin Head Project's Miami Medley, the Countertechnique Intensive with Nina Wollny, In/Out workshop with Samuel Minguillon, and 92Y's Dance Forward Winter Intensive; with choreographers such as Adam Barruch, Netta Yerushalmy, Mad Boots, and Kendra Portier. In 2019, he attended the American Dance Festival, where he studied Cunningham technique, improvisation and composition, and performed Bill T. Jones repertory under the direction of Shaela Vie Jenkins. He also appeared in a Tribe Of Love music video choreographed by Teresa Forstreuter. De La Cruz has performed with Alma Dance Theater, Jay Jackson (Laganja Estranja), Music On Pointe's "Dance for Difference" benefit concert, Lotus Lien's "When Speaking of Tongues", Lijun Zhou's "A Chinese Lady" at Flushing Town Hall, and with Allegra Preuss at Raw Popup 2018. In 2019, he was commissioned by Miami Light Project to create a work for their annual Here & Now Festival, and since then has been focusing on the creation of new cross-disciplinary works and dance on film.
FOREWORD
It is important to note that this is my attempt at de-prioritizing context:
This week has been incredibly informative, experiential, immersive, rigorous, and euphoric.
I think contained in that euphoria, I get the sense that all of my anxieties, irrational pressures, baggage and dystopian moods, worries and woes, are split into trillions of atomic pieces not unlike Willy Wonka teleporting the giant chocolate bar through a million tiny pieces and into the tv set during his demonstration of Wonka Vision to Mike Teavee in 1971's Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. It's odd to think of the suspension that "performance" affords you.
A reference we can all relate to, I'm presuming?
It's odd to think of the suspension that "performance" affords you. What makes it a performance if it is not seen or cannot be recorded? What makes it so, that acts which can be so risky, challenging, unconventional, or (I'm avoiding this word, but...fine) "performative", can reposition or re-contextualize the "baggage" we carry everywhere we go? It's the romantic American image of rushing to get to a certain place by a certain time, the pressures of work, keeping up with social constructs and expectations, being stuck in traffic, going to school, running to class, getting lunch, waking early, being punctual, getting sleep, dressing in a way that is non-imposing or acceptable (I'm thinking about Belaxis' poem "I left my home dressed well..."), the patterns that are lived in worn to the point where they feel like second-nature, like the things we need to do in order to survive...
then all of a sudden there is an act in the moment, risky but controllable in the moment, which can seem to challenge the hierarchy of those "needs" and turn them on their head. A simple gesture like walking, with enough space for a wide stride, but heightened to the ledge of a second floor balcony and all of a sudden the possibility of it all ending dramatically is juxtaposed simultaneaously with that of a contained and innocent act of curiosity. But aren't those simultaneous in our everyday life anyway? I biked everyday of Grass Stains week to the Wolfson Campus from a spot on Calle Ocho, crossing the Flagler Bridge everyday on a bike I wasn't fully familiar with, during morning rush hour. That felt every bit as risky if not more than walking on a second floor balcony. Was it also a performance?
Bow and I had a conversation about shared space and inhabited space which sticks out in my memory. We spoke of the things we feel more capable of getting away with if interactions with other experiencers-of-the-event lasted only a limited time. I mentioned speeding past other pedestrians on the street while biking, they see me moving perhaps faster or slower than I actually am as the vantage point changes for both of us. In that moment we decide what the moment is, sometimes the say something to me (I can't hear them because I am most likely wearing headphones rather than a helmet, an entire separate topic to be discussed about the pleasures of the illusion of orchestration of the chaotic [chaotic as in random, by chance, unpredictable on a small scale] world I'm traversing at the risk of concussion...or worse), Sometimes I yell something like telling a random pick up truck driver to turn his blinker on as I signal a blinker with my right hand by balling up my right hand in a fist and opening it entirely to mimic a blinking light, while my left hand steers.
Sometimes it's just a wink of my right eye, or fixed eye contact for the longest possible amount of seconds, before they have to return they walking, standing, or staring at their phones and myself to keeping my eyes on the road. Those are my favorite moments. In those moments I find a shared space. In my mind I think, "that's a performance." We are both aware of the space we shared, of the moment of synchronicity, have independently a general sense of the time it lasted, and have a nonverbal communication. In that moment we could tell one another an entire story about the past five years of each other's lives without saying a single word, or ten or twenty without the other's pre-knowledge and compress it to just a few seconds.
Bow and I also mentioned the "feeling of being watched", also called the Psychic Staring Effect. Why does this phenomenon occur when I am alone? It must logically mean that it is coming from and originating from my own perception of the moment, I project the review of the moment back onto myself and reflect it, and I can't stop imagining what it looks like from an outer perspective. The outer perspective has a small window in the current POV like a player-in player view. Except sometimes the screens witch and it becomes fullscreen. This is often useful, and often overpowering. What are the effects of "performing" or acting from a first-person perspective vs. a third- person perspective? Is either one completely possible? How does one know if there is an external entity or extra-sensory perspective present, in the case of performance, is it an audience? Does audience and performer have to experience something simultaneously outside of the performative act to confirm the shared space and time? Does a loud plane have to fly overhead, passengers unbeknownst of its own disturbance 35,000 feet below? We can both recognize that that event in fact occurred, regardless of how it is recalled or described.
My spatial bubble is isolated in my own perception. I don't get too close to any objects to avoid collision. I am going at the speed which feels comfortable or convenient to me at the moment, with the illusion that it is independent of surrounding objects and instead entirely dependent on my physical exertion. But actually, the pedestrian I previously mentioned and myself, for instance are sharing the same space with separate conscious and not spatial boundaries. The "bubble" is non-physically-existent, and it is evidence that I am living in memorized space, that which can be called inherited space, custom space, preferred space, biased space, lived space..."personal" space.
I didn't know it, but one of my goals for the week is to function outside of that realm, which overlaps the purely physical realm, in order to neutralize the "shared" space, or the space that is being occupied.
I've chosen to speak of these tracks and patterns of daily movement through space, in reference to the spatial memory we discussed during the workshop at the Live Arts lab and the "lived spaces" that emerge in the spaces we are considering. I think of all of the architecture of Building 1, my personal history with the practice of architecture, the architectonics, the perspective and axonometric drawings, the computerized simulations, and the precision required to design and meticulously draw out the thousands of micro-decisions required to design a building space, and how much the function of the space is considered, yet how isolated the actual "use" of the space is in relation to the actual tangible, physical structure that exists in space. The building design always feel independent of what happens in the the actual inhabitance of the building, the movements exist exclusively to the structure itself, unpredictable, chaotic; the rush to get to class or to go up or down the escalator aren't embedded in the concrete of the structure, which is made up of microscopically broken stone, gravel, rock, cement, etc. (Can you imagine what that would look like? George Segal's concrete figure sculptures come to mind, like "Abraham's farewell to Ishmael"... that's a very flat and literal way to imagine it...
...but then i start to think about gothic architecture, flying buttresses, and even beyond that, ancient architecture or dream-like structures like Piranesi prisons...let's not even go there right now...or shall we?)
However these patterns are affected by and projected onto the structure, and one may say the structure is also "affected" by the movement in to structure.
...but then i start to think about gothic architecture, flying buttresses, and even beyond that, ancient architecture or dream-like structures like Piranesi prisons...let's not even go there right now...or shall we?)
However these patterns are affected by and projected onto the structure, and one may say the structure is also "affected" by the movement in to structure.
Imagine all of the buildings that never got built because they were too "affected" before even being built in the physical realm...
I may have gone too far on a tangent...
to further contextualize my experience I will also mention that *queue violin* my recent experiences with foreclosure and eviction have sensitized my body even further to social spaces, architectural structures, and especially being comfortable inhabiting or being a physical body in a space without feeling like I am "performing".
The concept of home, a highly personalized space, is constantly shifting, eroding, disappearing and reappearing and that home can be more of a mental space is something I need to adapt to, like the idea of finding ataraxia. I might be wrong.
In short, my explorations in the space are automatically in friction to the honesty of completing tasks in a way that feels fulfilled, because I, like my co-collaborators, have already entered the space with all of my baggage, prejudgements of what this structure is, and predictions of what experience this week will be. I try to push against it, I try to purify my output, and in the process I am holding all of the weight of my emotional body. I see clearly and try my hardest to revert back the patterns and movements already existing in the space, the spatial memory and all that is apparent in the site itself. To make it so that I am not imposing my own narrative in the space, but that if a narrative that is already in the space needs to emerge, so it will. or better yet my body may function as a vehicle to excavate or highlight that narrative or that hidden embodiment of the (negative) space.
And in doing so, the emotional states are heightened, much like the ("safe") walk on the ledge, which although calming, serene, and quite a beautiful vantage point, quickly became a safety concern for many.
The thinner my skin gets the more I feel the space has compressed me, but the more weight of my emotional body I hold, the more tasks (I will mention in more detail what these tasks are later) I complete honestly, if I'm not too preoccupied, and therefore the more patterns and movements emerge themselves in the space to me and the more liberty I feel in moving through the space. The more exposure of spatial patterns and non-conventional patterns are exposed to the pedestrians in the space, to the "audience, and the more I begin to see the space as matter and as a volume rather than as a "building" or campus.
Consider the magnetic feeling one gets when something gets close to the tender skin of a freshly-made bruise.
DAY I
I'm considering my notes form day I, not even having a chance to read over them before the foreword, I see the line "the visual doesn't contain all the information, the visual is connected to the architectural, the monumental, which hides the lived patterns in the space."
Glad to see I've absorbed these connections and that they are emerging at different points in my study, without have to cue them in my presentation of my research. I suppose it means they are embedded.
For all physical and practical concerns, we are working on site in Building 1 of Miami Dade College's Wolfson Campus in Downtown Miami.
The building is large and mostly made of concrete and steel.There is a large atrium on the inside with a shiny floor and a (literal) glass ceiling that has a black iron structure and lots of flags. There are escalators zig zagging up the southern most inner boundary of the atrium leading up to 6 floors. There are thick columns and heavy ceilings, a half-exposed stairway with concrete half-walls as balconies and a large opening on the west side of the building which has a wide fountain, ramps, and a large optical illusion painting.
Its form feels unapologetic, large, heavy, and has been described as brutalist, even as a "beast" by one of our collaborators, Amber Ortega. It feels like a leftover from another decade, a time when this felt like what the future was supposed to be like, was supposed to symbolize presence and forwardness in its construction.
We discuss the difference between a map and a cartography (cartography as a "lived map of the senses"), in relationship to the audience, to a spatial trajectory, and to movement through the site. How does one document movement in the physical space, spatially? How does one tell the story of the spatial trajectory? What are the markers of spatial tracks in the space? Those markers, visible or invisible can be guidelines, as well as information received in movement in the building already.
We were tasked with creating a cartography of the space. I've decided to create a sound cartography of the space.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
The building is large and mostly made of concrete and steel.There is a large atrium on the inside with a shiny floor and a (literal) glass ceiling that has a black iron structure and lots of flags. There are escalators zig zagging up the southern most inner boundary of the atrium leading up to 6 floors. There are thick columns and heavy ceilings, a half-exposed stairway with concrete half-walls as balconies and a large opening on the west side of the building which has a wide fountain, ramps, and a large optical illusion painting.
Its form feels unapologetic, large, heavy, and has been described as brutalist, even as a "beast" by one of our collaborators, Amber Ortega. It feels like a leftover from another decade, a time when this felt like what the future was supposed to be like, was supposed to symbolize presence and forwardness in its construction.
We discuss the difference between a map and a cartography (cartography as a "lived map of the senses"), in relationship to the audience, to a spatial trajectory, and to movement through the site. How does one document movement in the physical space, spatially? How does one tell the story of the spatial trajectory? What are the markers of spatial tracks in the space? Those markers, visible or invisible can be guidelines, as well as information received in movement in the building already.
We were tasked with creating a cartography of the space. I've decided to create a sound cartography of the space.
[TO BE CONTINUED]