With Project 24, Mapa Teatro extended their interest in the investigation of shifting architectures, ruins, and movement displayed in their previous projects. This time considering the frictions and the overlapping between exhibition displays and theatrical staging. The artists focused on the archives and history of the LACMA’s Bing Theater, founded in 1965. As part of the museum’s major renovation of its campus, the building where the Bing is housed is scheduled for demolition. Intrigued by the Bing’s pending destruction, Mapa Teatro developed a three-day performance that took place in the Fossil Lab of the nearby La Brea Tar Pits Museum. The fossil Lab’s working area is encased by glass panels facing the galleries so visitors can watch scientists at work.
Props for the performance included old photographs and documents from the Bing, as well as objects from the theater: a teardrop from the chandelier installed in its lobby, two seats, a curtain, old projectors, and lamps. Mapa Teatro enlisted the help of staff and volunteers of the museum to perform and to analise these “unidentified” fragments and remmants found at LACMA, which probably once belonged to the old theater that no longer exists.
They turned to the logic of science to fictionalize the theater’s disappearance from museum campus. The installation featured improbable relics -some of the first projectors used at the Bing-, projecting images from the performance at the Fossil Lab and an exact copy of the front curtain of the Bing, made in the same shop and with the same materials as the original.
During the A Universal History of Infamy exhibition, the video of the performance was also screened once a month at the Bing.
Los Angeles, Estados Unidos
