MAPS 1:610 is a collaboration between painter Jorge R. Pombo (Barcelona, Spain,1973) and Saul Daniele Ardillo (Bari, Italy, 1988), a choreographer with Fondazione Nazionale della Danza / Aterballetto, one of Italy’s leading contemporary dance companies.

Both artists explore the notion of the city as a multi-layered, arbitrary human creation, where different, sometimes opposing and confusing experiences are forced to coexist. What does it mean to live in a community? Are we forced to renounce our individuality? How does this relentless energy and chaos change us, and the city itself? Can the work of art be translated into other media and embodied by other subjectivities and still keep its integrity? What happens when the artist relinquishes artistic control?

Jorge R. Pombo and Saul Daniele Ardillo explore these questions in this powerful work by connecting technology, dance and painting. Pombo combines the digital and the analog by producing large scale charcoal maps that use cities from Google Maps as models, while the dancers complete the work by dancing on the painter’s canvases, defacing the maps.

Pombo was inspired by the Black Mountain College, and wanted to investigate how chance and the loss of control can reshape the pictorial process, while dance itself becomes a powerful alter ego that allows for the work to be completed autonomously. Ardillo, on the other hand, develops a choreographic code in which movement is no longer exclusively the medium but also becomes a creative means.

The audience witnesses the act of creation as an uncontrollable process of change and release. The spectator is driven to ponder on the city’s identity, at first recognizable and reassuring, but quickly morphing and blurring into something else by the movement of the bodies over the ground, to reveal a surprising final result.

At Momentum Artists, we are excited for this special project in collaboration with Fondazione Nazionale della Danza / Aterballetto to bring this powerful work to New York, a city that represents the ultimate experiment in urban living, where all the chaos, confusion, tension and wonder of the daily grind is in direct contrast with the seemingly orderly, geometric grid of the city. It is not by chance that Pombo takes most of his inspiration from this city, where he lived between 2010 and 2015.

It is imperative to foster opportunities for artists of different disciplines, like Pombo and Ardillo, to collaborate in order to produce something new around a common idea.