The following description comes from the event organizer.

Private Speculations Performance
Oregon Contemporary (Platform Space)
8371 North Interstate Avenue, Portland, OR, 97217


 >Friday, December 3, 3:30–5:00 PM

 >Saturday, December 4, 6:30–8:00 PM

 >Sunday, December 5, 3:30–5:00 PM PDT

Emmanuela Soria Ruiz’s performance Private Speculations takes Irish-born modernist architect Eileen Gray’s Screen (1922) as its point of departure, reconstructing a prototype to scale around which sketches from Gray’s unfinished Ballet des Animaux (1916–1919) are performed. The impulse to reconstruct this partition of the background, psychological interiority, and intimacy conveys a desire to know, intellectually and somatically, what and how this object can show and tell—if we take it seriously as a subject. Soria Ruiz performatively speculates against a heteronormative historicization of Gray’s modernist legacy: could the screen have been not only a witness, but an active non-human participant, alongside animal imaginaries, that helped shape Gray’s queer subjectivity? 

Private Speculations is a performance within the exhibition The Longest Leg, organized by independent curator Laurel V. McLaughlin in collaboration with Fuller Rosen Gallery. The series of free public programs include partnerships with performer Allie Hankins, FLOCK Dance Center, Oregon Contemporary, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art Low-Residency MFA in Visual Studies and the Hallie Ford Graduate School of Willamette University. The programming series is generously supported in part by a 2021 Regional Arts & Culture Council Make|Learn|Build Grant. Private Speculations is further financially made possible with the support of a 2021 PICE Mobility Grant of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E).