The Ghost Party
2024

Developed collaboratively by Oihana Altube, Raúl Marcos, María Escobar, Fátima Cué Pérez, Brandon LaBelle, Paco Lidón, Catalina Mahecha, and África Nieto, the work was filmed at peripheral sites in Madrid in 2022 and aims at capturing scenes of transformation. Taking guidance from the ghost as a liminal figure, the performers construct a ritualized dance of withdrawal, leading to the slow unfolding of strange, hypnotic, useless expressions. These are gestures and movements that destitute the operative mechanisms of a productive self, seeking to inhabit a new planetary relation – a deep form of connection. Throughout the ghost provides a poetic pathway for disappearing from oneself in order to re-emerge.

The ghost party is a missing party; 
recuperating an impossible togetherness elsewhere – a party constituted by the negative;
the ghost is always liminal, neither arriving nor departing;
neither alive or dead, seen or unseen; 
the ghost haunts the social order, problematizing the party as a weekend break – instead, it pervades, insinuates itself into all types of scenes and spaces, turning the party into a ghost expression, a negativity; 
the negative party haunts the house, the city, with liminality, with a festivity that does not die; the ghost keeps the party going, carrying it into other spheres, making of it a sensibility; 
yet, the ghost party is always on the side of destitution, an absence, a negativity – the party is never fully constituted or capturable;
it flees, it wanders, it searches for an impossible expression (the party is always a process of ruining oneself); 
the ghost might be the hangover that remains, what is left over, that lingers and also, refuses to leave;
and that gives articulation to an impossible social body.