Jorge Gil Angel |
Bogotá (EFE).- Patti Smith is more than a singer, she is an upright artist and her award-winning career, marked by exploration and transgressions, reflects this. However, the American assures that the thread that unites all facets of her is poetry, which takes her from one plateau to another.
“Poetry has been a thread that has carried me from one plateau to the next, and when I say poetry I mean it in a more general sense. For me, my writing, even if it is prose or improvised, has elements of poetry, ”she says in a telephone interview with EFE regarding his upcoming visit to Bogotá.
The 76-year-old American artist (Chicago, December 30, 1946), says that since she was little she loved poetry and began to write poems in adolescence.
“It was not music and I never thought about recording, I came from a poor family. So I didn’t have many opportunities, I didn’t go to a big university, I didn’t have money to travel, but poetry led me to acting, which evolved into writing songs and recording my first album, ‘Horses’ (1975), which gave me took me on tour, which took me to see the world and finally led me to Soundwalk (Collective) and now to Bogotá”, he affirms.
World premiere in Bogota
In the Colombian capital, Smith will give two performances on July 25 and 26 at the Teatro Colón together with Soundwall Collective, an artistic platform with which she will make the multi-channel installation “Correspondences”, which will be open to the public until October 4 in the Fanny Mikey Room of the National Center for the Arts.
This will be the American’s first visit to the Colombian capital, where she will be excited to meet people through “art, poetry and communication.”
Her two performances, in which she will perform some pieces with musicians from the Soundwall Collective, “are very poetry-based, but they are also visual because they will have special videos and what makes it unique is that all the material” is hers.
“I think, like I said, it’s poetry and visual, but on topics that are important to all of us, our environment, our endangered species, art, spiritual concerns, and there’s even a piece about (the writer and Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo) Pasolini that has graphic content,” says Smith.
In “Correspondences”, the collective and the artist worked together for seven years in which they have tried to discover the sound steps of poets, filmmakers, revolutionaries and extraordinary events.
Much of the work was done by Soundwalk Collective founder Stephan Crasneanscki, who tried to create a musical space for Smith to inhabit with his own poetry and voice.
“It is a spectrum of exploration, and what happens when I act is always different because I have the pieces that I read, but the energy of the people or their concentration, the atmosphere of the place, always makes certain changes happen, unexpected things happen” , explains the artist.
That is why in the performances the attendees will not see a rock concert, which is why the artist promises to sing in “some places” in the Colombian capital, where she will spend five days trying to “really know the country”.
“I am a worker”
For Smith, as for everyone, the lockdown due to the pandemic was a difficult time, but he managed to get ahead thanks to a book that he worked on in a moment of complete solitude.
“I had to acclimatize myself to public life again, but in another way of responding, I am a worker, I have to work. I feel like it’s something I don’t do just for money, fame or something like that, it’s something I do to explore, to search. I really need to work every day,” she says.
And part of that work is in writing, because for her writing is the “articulation of the imagination.”
“I was never a great student, but I always had a very good imagination, and writing has allowed me to build a non-academic reputation, through my books, through my poetry. It is something that has always been my friend, I write every day ”, she highlights.
Writing has become so essential to her that every day she gets up early and spends two and a half hours, between 8:00 and 10:30, letting her imagination run wild in her lyrics, no matter what.
“It is my daily practice. As the great Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño said, I think of writing as my daily practice, just as many people pray every day”, concludes “the godmother of punk” with an emotional tone of voice, as if this were the first time that she has shown her art to the world