lives and works in San Jan, Puerto Rico
Guillermo Calzadilla
born 1971, Havana, Cuba
lives and works in San Jan, Puerto Rico
For the 26th Kaldor Public Art Project in Australia, internationally renowned artist duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla present the celebrated project Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on 'Ode to Joy' for a Prepared Piano in the State Library of Victoria’s Cowen Gallery. Presented to great acclaim at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Stop, Repair, Prepare combines sound, performance and sculpture, a captivating new experience for audiences. For this piece, the artists carved a hole in the center of a grand piano, through which a pianist plays the famous Fourth Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, usually referred to as “Ode to Joy.” The performer leans over the keyboard and plays upside down and backwards, while moving with the piano across the vast atrium. The result is a structurally incomplete version of the ode—the hole in the piano renders two octaves inoperative—that fundamentally transforms both the player/instrument dynamic and the signature melody, underlining the contradictions and ambiguities of a song that has long been invoked as a symbol of humanist values and national pride.
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