Bryan Giuseppi Rodriguez Cambana, “Balcony 1,” 2022
Bryan Giuseppi Rodriguez Cambana, “Balcony 2,” 2022
Bryan Giuseppi Rodriguez Cambana, “Track,” 2022
Ópera de Balcón
January 28 - March 27, 2022
Cell Project Space, London
Bryan Giuseppi Rodriguez Cambana
In Ópera de Balcón, two balconies in a dimly lit space sing to each other from across the room. The song, written by Rodriguez Cambana, is a ballad hinged upon complications in romance, timing, and distance. Viewers are invited to decode intimate and covert messages shared between structures to uncover an opera coloured by militarised modes of communication, personal entanglements, and the political framings of migration and diaspora.
Ópera de Balcón mirrors the physical spaces that act as intimate communicators between Black/indigenous communities within the surreal experience of migration, likening it to a mystical-play and performative gesture in which surroundings are in constant transition. Through his own lived experience, Rodriguez Cambana reflects on and engages with a (his) community; one that he knows as irrational, contradictory, and poor. Hoping to shatter illusions of equality Ópera de Balcón brings in the material realities of class, operating through the intersections of the ‘public’ and ‘private'.
Ópera de Balcón was developed after a six-month curatorial fellowship at Cell Project Space. Apart from the exhibition, we organized a public program that included a bring your own vinyl record event and a cajón workshop with the Latin American Youth Forum.
This project was generously supported by Arts Council England.
January 28 - March 27, 2022
Cell Project Space, London
Bryan Giuseppi Rodriguez Cambana
In Ópera de Balcón, two balconies in a dimly lit space sing to each other from across the room. The song, written by Rodriguez Cambana, is a ballad hinged upon complications in romance, timing, and distance. Viewers are invited to decode intimate and covert messages shared between structures to uncover an opera coloured by militarised modes of communication, personal entanglements, and the political framings of migration and diaspora.
Ópera de Balcón mirrors the physical spaces that act as intimate communicators between Black/indigenous communities within the surreal experience of migration, likening it to a mystical-play and performative gesture in which surroundings are in constant transition. Through his own lived experience, Rodriguez Cambana reflects on and engages with a (his) community; one that he knows as irrational, contradictory, and poor. Hoping to shatter illusions of equality Ópera de Balcón brings in the material realities of class, operating through the intersections of the ‘public’ and ‘private'.
Ópera de Balcón was developed after a six-month curatorial fellowship at Cell Project Space. Apart from the exhibition, we organized a public program that included a bring your own vinyl record event and a cajón workshop with the Latin American Youth Forum.
This project was generously supported by Arts Council England.
Bryan Giuseppi Rodriguez Cambana, “Love Songs,” 2022
Photos courtesy of Rob Harris / Cell Project Space