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Carmen Yruela Baena & Juan Gallego Benot
Carmen Yruela (Seville, 1998) is a flamenco singer and flamenco singing teacher at the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Jaén. She began her artistic career at the age of seventeen in the tablaos and peñas of Seville. Blending tradition and modernity, she is renowned for her interdisciplinary approach. She has performed in Uzbekistan (2022), Argentina (2023) and Estonia (2024). A member of the techno-flamenco group Ciervoss since 2021, she is currently preparing her first album with Hartta.
Juan Gallego Benot (Seville, 1997) is a writer, doctoral student and contemporary art critic for the El País newspaper. Author of the poetry collections Oración en el huerto (2020) and Las cañadas oscuras (2023), he has published the essay La ciudad sin imágenes (2023). His academic research focuses on rhetoric and modernity. He teaches at the Autonomous University of Madrid and the University of Groningen. His poems have been set to music by Iñaki Estrada. He has taken part in a number of renowned literary and artistic festivals.
The two artists have been collaborating informally for over ten years. Their aesthetic interests are closely linked to several pillars. The intersection between contemporary musical practice and poetry, which encompasses the revival of flamenco as a practice situated in a specific environment and attached to its history, tradition and gypsy heritage, is at the heart of their shared practices. In addition, they both work on different aspects of contemporary art and music, whether from the point of view of art criticism or electronic music. They are currently working on two joint projects. The first, whose first proposal was presented at the second edition of the Arquitecturas deseantes festival (2023), was based on the musicalization and staging of Benot's collection of poems, Las cañadas oscuras, through various experiments with flamenco and the urban tradition of the flâneur. The second of these projects will be presented for the first time in Malaga, as part of the Art Explora festival, this November. The project, which will crystallize into a play in the form of a "tablao intervenu", will be presented in Malaga as part of the Art Explora festival in November.
It will represent and sing of flamenco's journey through a particular water cycle, in which images are projected onto the tropical cultures of the province of Malaga. These images are linked to the evolution of flamenco itself as it traverses Latin America, to the colonial dynamics that are being established, and to the sound elements that speak can be linked to a musical drought in flamenco song and dance, as well as to the ecological crisis. The aim is to look for elements in flamenco dance, lyrics and music that refer to drought at different levels, in order to find interpretive tools (in the epistemological and musical sense of the term). This is a work in progress in collaboration with guitarist Carmen García, dancer Laura Guastini and visual artist and researcher Pablo Caldera.
