Video Program presented by the Video Proyector Festival
Mario Gutiérrez Cru
Inicio: 11/19/2022 18:00
Plataforma Nave | 72'
For the second day of projection, the NAVE Platform, the curatorship begins with the piece by Christian Lagata entitled A World In Ruins that speaks of dystopian places, of constructions for masses of peasants as possible housing solutions and the failure of these, or these oppositions to utopias, the place where everything is as it should be. Leonardo Lippolis in "Journey to the end of the city" defined it as "Dystopia, not only indicates negation but also alteration, it is, therefore, the antithesis of the perfect society, a totally undesirable place product of the failures of "progress".
If we talk about utopian places to live, the artist Carlos Llavata presents Bruming my house (2088), an almost ironic action on the concept of cleaning our home, in this case the Mediterranean Sea, totally deteriorated by the human being himself who loves and destroys it at the same time. And at the same time, an action that contrasts the sport of the rich like scuba diving with the more everyday action of cleaning a house.
Some people land, settle in countries and that makes them question where they feel, how they feel, what they want to see, build or how they would like to live. Sergio Cabrera, an inhabitant of the Vallecas neighborhood in Madrid, Spain, whose work Imágenes ahogadas tells us about how individuals make a territory their own, building houses, streets, as a collective act, in solidarity, political on the one hand, but apolitical on the other, since it is not a feeling of belonging to a color, a state, but to a social group that makes them fight for rights, a way of life. Sergio also talks about how these territories change and how technologies approach the territories, often erasing their histories, dehumanizing them to "facilitate our existence", or so they say.
When the original people have to be displaced by urban, wind and extractivist megaprojects, they can or should rise up and protest. In the work Neocolonialismo by artist Beatriz Millón, she talks about the colonial order with which we coexist and its effects on the original peoples who resist dispossession and the constant violations of human rights.
Eugenio Ampudia claims as his own iconic places of culture and art history. He began the series in 2008 at the Prado Museum, under Goya's Los fusilamientos del 3 de mayo and follows temples of art such as the Alhambra, the ARCO fair, the Library of the Palácio Nacional da Ajuda in Lisbon, the Palau de la Música in Barcelona or the Academy of Rome. In his series, so far without an end date, Dónde dormir proposes the act of occupying public spaces as a political convulsion of recent years (15M, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Museums, etc.), and in his case these overnight stays have become an act of resistance in itself and a declaration of intentions.
Some lock themselves in places of worship or culture, others stay at home and decide to inhabit their space, taking it as islands, as places to conquer, as Ben-Her did with all his works in family, Alejandro Ramirez does it without touching the ground. In El camino más largo, the artist turns his studio into a space of almost a game, of challenges and dangers.
But if the city leaves us no other way out than to take refuge and not leave, as happened with the fear that we felt during the pandemic (2020-21), or to escape from it and invent other possible worlds or shelters, in that case the solutions are varied by the following artists present.
For his part, the artist Rubén Martín de Lucas, always in a subtle way, speaks to us of politics, of territory, of time. And in his series Repúblicas Mínimas, a life project, and pre-pandemic, he invites himself to inhabit a piece of land for 24 hours of no more than 100m2 and by a single person, in this case the artist himself. It belongs to the Stupid Borders series that puts on the table the absurd borders that serve to highlight the ephemeral, artificial and transitory nature of these conventions without which we are still unable to coexist.
Others live in much smaller spaces, 100m2 is a luxury that an undocumented immigrant, who works from sunrise to sunset in an intensive crop field picking fruit, is not even capable of dreaming of. The also Spanish Eduardo Balanza talks about The Fragility of Inhabiting showing us both with drones and handheld camera the new capitalism, the forms of habitability associated with work where the habitat is built with waste materials and life is not worth more than what you get that day, if you get to the end of the working day of 16 hours a day.
«Two paths present themselves to me,
I have only chosen the least frequented,
That's all the difference». Robert Frost
Text: Mario Gutiérrez Cru
“The term dystopia arises in opposition to the concept of utopia, the place where everything is as it should be. Dystopia, not only indicates denial but also alteration, is, therefore, the antithesis of the perfect society, a completely undesirable place product of the failures of «progress». » Travel to the end of the city. Leonardo Lippolis In July 1972, the residential urban complex of Pruitt-Igoe, a “Lecorbusian” dwelling unit, built on the outskirts of Saint-Louis (Missouri) by the architect Minoru Yamasaki between 1952 and 1955, was blown up in the air. petition of its inhabitants, a mass of peasants forced to urban immigration. Criticism dated that moment as the liberation of architecture from the pedagogical role imposed by post-war II functionalism. Capital had decided that the only functions of contemporary life were to produce, rest-consume, inhabit, and circulate rapidly. This system of integral control of bodies and minds, inherited from industry and prison and embellished through technological and consumer comfort. Chance, bad luck, or a precise sign of the times, more than thirty years later another collapse, that of the Twin Towers, on September 11, 2001, built by Yamasaki himself, will mark a new moment of historical rupture.Causing crowd management protocols to be rewritten and citizens living in a state of constant terror. More security cameras were placed to permanently monitor the city in order to prevent further terrorist actions, turning privacy into a utopia and living in surveillance similar to that of Big Brother. Nightmare and dream, dystopia and heterotopia, city and apocalypse. In this video fragments are juxtaposed, as «found footage», of these two key milestones in the history and destiny of the world and of the contemporary city. Audiovisual documents belonging to the experimental film «Koyaanisqatsi» by Godfrey Reggio, 1983 In which the demolition of Pruitt-igoe appears, the original rhythm of the rewound film being modified, advancing it and returning it at a normal pace. And «WTC 9/11» by photojournalist Mark LaGanga’s, 2001, who documents the collapse of the Twin Towers and the moments after it, and only part of the audio corresponding to the collapse of the second tower has been used.
Series of very simple video actions that illustrate hostile contexts, oppression and vulnerability in which human beings find themselves. This is a constant in Llavata's work.
La posición del artista en un entorno manipulado por los medios, la posición del ser humano, en un mundo aplastante y de opresión.
Diving is usually for pleasure, the Mediterranean is a well known environment, and we are well aware of the interference that has deteriorated it, tourism, fishing, construction, all cheap and excessive. The underwater context, for example, is a context alien to human beings. We have a lot of dislike of going to places that we do not know and do not take care of, they are priceless environments and we must be sensitive to them.
Imágenes Ahogadas consists of an installation created from a file of found images. These images bring together a container of portraits and snapshots about the neighborhood revolution that took place in Vallecas (Madrid) during the 60s, 70s, and 80s of the 20th century. A revolution based on a common struggle, and continuous conquest of common freedoms.
The aim of the proposal is to review, reflect and encourage critical thinking about the claim, through the image of space as a common place and the relationship between the inhabitants that shape it. To achieve this, the proposed visualities will transit between the images of the file and the sea of data in the information age in which we are immersed, in order to build a discourse about the problems of resignification and reconstruction currently suffered by images.
The installation will consist of a video-essay accompanied by the file found. The video- essay is the result of the synergies, transversality, and divergences manifested during the file research process. On the other hand, such file containing the images is made up of four drawers of slides distributed among twenty-seven thematic sections (religious acts, Latin American guerrillas, demonstrations, graffiti, trips or evictions, and relaxation in Vallecas, among others). Narratives hidden throughout decades and recently revealed, causing a continuous dialogue between formats and visual structures.
On the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (México), capital has transformed wind into goods and a way of land use and expropriation. The construction of a wind power’s megaproject has created -in exchange for both the lands and the wind- a restricted amount of temporary employment in the area, as well as the accelerated transformation of the communities’ way of living and coexistence, a strong social and communal polarization, and a series of negative environmental impacts related to the construction of the wind farm. Down on that south spot of Oaxaca, the bini’zaa and ikoots community life’s spoils and radical transformation is justified by the green energy speech (carried out by transnational companies such as Iberdrola, Gas Natural Fenosa, Acciona, Gamesa or EDF Energies Nouvelles). The project Neocolonialism has lied in an sculptural-luminous intervention inside of one of the Unión Hidalgo’s wind farms, besides an audiovisual system which reflects this megaproject’s reality: the colonial order we coexist with and its impacts on the native people who fight off the spoils and continuous human rights violations.
The exhibition brings together for the first time all the pieces from his most extensive series to date: Where to Sleep. The artist has been staying overnight since 2008 in various iconic places of culture and art history. He began the series at the Prado Museum, under Goya's Los fusilamientos del 3 de mayo, then at the Alhambra, at the ARCO fair, at the Library of the Palácio Nacional da Ajuda in Lisbon and recently at the Palau de la Música in Barcelona.
Throughout the series, the action is based on sleeping inside a space dedicated to art, something that historically has been considered illegal and subversive. The simplicity of this gesture underlies Ampudia's position of resistance to certain attitudes in the art world that have been taken for granted and have since become conventional.
It is a series of actions developed within the working studio. They are halfway between simple physical displacements and spectacular balancing movements. As if it were a challenge, the only condition imposed is not to step on the floor during the strange routes that take him from one corner of the house to another. In this way, what would be a simple transit becomes a physical exercise of self-improvement in what, ultimately, would be a metaphor of a constant flight towards the extreme of things.
Stupid Borders is an array of works and actions in which the spectator is invited to reflect on the relationship between people and land, and to restudy our intense sense of ownership towards the Earth, an entity which transcends us in terms of age.
Under the title “Stupid Borders”, the artist sets a three-steps simple exercise: take possession of 100 m², draw a boundary and live in it. The results are one-day microstates inhabited by just one person. Nonsensical borders which expose the ephemeral, artificial and transitional nature of these conventions failing which coexistence is impossible for us.
In the new capitalism, the forms of habitability associated with work and immigrant settlements in areas traditionally linked to intensive agriculture have produced new communities that build their homes and lives on the boundaries of society. Through these improvised constructions built from the ground up, with waste materials or from inappropriate places adapted to their needs, we have developed an investigation shot with drones and fixed cameras, mapping the landscape and its transformation on a real scale.
