Soliloquy in Sign

Title: Soliloquy in Sign

Year: 2014

Measures: 20.5 x 30 cm c/u, 20.5 x 416 cm total

Technique: 13 digital photographs of the performance held at Pier 54, printed with inkjet pigment lasting acid-free paper

Credit photos: Pier 54: Francisca Benitez, Soliloquy in Sign, 2014. Photo of Liz Ligons © 2014 Francisca Benitez, Liz Ligons and Friends of the High Line. Commissioned and produced by Friends of the High Line

The year 2014 Benitez was invited by Cecilia Alemani and Melanie Kress to participate in the project, Pier 54, a tribute and response to the project Pier 18 (1971), organized by Willoughby Sharp, which involved 27 men artists. On Pier 54 participated in 27 women artists who performed actions on a pier in disuse in the West Side, Manhattan, documented by Liz Ligons. In that moment Benitez in American Sign Language (ASL) and music”, in the New School, and began his research on poetry Deaf. His response was to move his practice to the proposed space. During 3 months, the dock was transformed in the space of practice, making public something private. The grand staircase in the “disuse” yes it was used, there he saw a series of actions while recounting what he saw, telling the actions of 1971, the dead, Matta-Clark hanging in the arch remaining from the old structure, the framing of Baldessari or turning into a clumsy Acconci. He paid tributes to his father, to the Central Park Five, the release cuir. Benitez has defined a script materialized in a poem concrete and took refuge in the soliloquy, coinciding with collective readings of the Soliloquy of the Individual on the eve of the 100th birthday of Nicanor Parra. The documentation captured fragments of the speech, in a game of chance with the photographer that drove ASL and protecting the privacy of the soliloquy. The day of the performance was one more in practice, with witnesses.