The idea of performance curation is new to me. The rules, as it were, are still being set and so the boundaries keep moving and everything is at play. There is the notion of play without being fancy.

I started playing with the thought of movements and flows and the idea, provoked from PCI Artistic Curator Pineda’s performance research Movement Without Moving, of capturing or being aware of motion that is implied or not obvious. I am reminded of experiments in wind tunnels, of Edgerton’s smoke wisps on propeller blades, of Da Vinci’s water eddies and turbulence, of using laser to reveal the imperfections, the “movements”, on the surfaces of manufactured objects, or even elevation and contour maps.

Movements and flows are everywhere, but like light, we often see or are only aware of their sources and not the phenomena themselves. We see the sun or where the sun shines on the wall, but not light itself. We see a dancer, we hear music, we see water pipes and electric cables, we see numbers, or we see where our money comes—and then goes. But in all these “flows”, we only ever acknowledge flow, the motion, when it is being manifested by something. Once, there was a baby, who became a toddler, then a boy, a teenager, a man, … and so on. But one will hardly address the person “baby” when all grown-up. A “man” is a verb hiding inside a noun, and the verb is grow, evolve, or change. But hardly anyone notices that. They notice the frozen growth embodied by the man. Like the snapshot of a single frame in a filmstrip. The arbitrary point that names a line. Frozen motion, frozen flow. Kind of reminds one of Moore’s site sculptures, Brancusi’s bird, or even Duchamp’s descending nude.

The logo tries to give emphasis to the idea of flow or motion, solidifies it, puts it on the foreground like in so many psychology tests about foregrounds and backgrounds, the idea of flow and those who coax or guide it. Tt tries to call the attention of the beholder, to be more aware of the flow all around us.

PCI logo concept and design by Joel Bermudez

Text written by Joel Bermudez