"Different Trains"

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Photo Courtesy of Fudació Joan Miró

In 1988, the North American Steve Reich, one of the leading figures of minimalism, composed a piece about the Jewish Holocaust. Almost thirty years later, this video work by Beatriz Caravaggio confers visual life on the score interpreted by the Kronos Quartet.

The starting point is Different Trains, the work by Steve Reich, one of the essential names in the history of contemporary music of the U.S., together with composers like John Cage and Philip Glass. The composer recalls the train journeys he himself made from 1939 and 1942 between New York and Los Angeles following the divorce of his parents, and relates it to the train trip to a concentration camp that he would have been forced to make a child of the same age in the Europe of that same period.

Twenty-eight years after the piece was composed, the director Beatriz Caravaggio was commissioned by the BBVA Foundation to create a videographic work to put images to the music. She did it starting from the recording that the Kronos Quartet had done in 1989. On this recording, the atist mounted images that show both the beauty of the American landscape juxtaposed with the sombre images of the trains that transported the deportees to the extermination camps and photos of the crudest side of the war. A screen divided into three parts allowed Caravaggio to create a rich collage of images in the form of a multichannel video that has been considered by Steve Reich himself as a "reflective and exciting" work.

This exhibit has been created in conjunction with the Grec 2019 Festival de Barcelona. 

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