At last I am back. No matter how busy I am I seem to have a delay from making something to showing it in this blog of about 2 years... So much for new media's immediacy!
However, this is not the place to sum up my life or tell you what I have been up to, or make some sort of branding of myself. It is a place to share things with you. It sometimes coincides with a need to try to make sense of what I've done before I embark on a new adventure. Most times it is the opposite rather, I have no adventure in sight so I am left alone with what I've made. This time, however, I want to show something that I did not make on my own. It was a collaborative project made in early 2009 with photographer Ochi Reyes, who you saw in my previous post. It was only possible thanks to the help of Celia and Ana in Cabo de Gata, Spain and the support from Eva Russo and Annalisa Dunn back in the U.K.
Péndulo was presented in the ruined basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, London and later commissioned and installed under London Bridge at Shunt. To see the pictures and the video will never account for the experience that was "being there". Nevertheless, it remains the only possible way of sharing some of it with all of you today. Perhaps the personal and social context of this work has shifted since it was originally presented but its essence continues to captivate me.
On July the 24th 1928 a man was tragically killed in the surroundings of the Cortijo de Fraile in Nijar, Almeria, Spain. It is the story of a bride that escaped from his groom on a mule with her true lover, her cousin, only to be confronted by the groom’s brother in law who finally shot him down. The events leading to his death were to inspire Federico García Lorca to write Blood Wedding in 1932 capturing the essence of the tragedy while making it an iconic example of Spain’s blood culture; a culture of memory, of passion and of tragedy; a culture of remembrance, of bereavement and barefacedness.
‘Love/Death’ is at its centre. A single deep word that sums up the tragic feeling that is at the heart of every passionate existence. A single word that best expresses the paradoxical character of life. It does not talk about rational truths but about the truth of passion, the unity between suffering and understanding, between feeling and looking inside us. It is a culture that, comprehensibly, has been refused with contempt and violence by the culture of progress, of reason and of reconciliation, by that vision of the world that for such a long time has considered itself to be the only one possible and true. This culture of progress self-imposed itself throughout Spain’s democratic transition stressing the need to always look to the future and never look back.
Péndulo takes the Cortijo de Fraile as a departure point to create a spatial and sensory experience where fear and attraction constitute the principal forces and movements and where the visitor remains the subject of the piece.
In Péndulo there is a collection of photographic images buried both at a representational level and a physical level within the installation. They form a circle of point of lights in a darkened room. In the centre, a bag of blood hangs of a chain from the roof of the room. The circle is fractured where an image is missing. This lack is filled with the projection of a video. The sound is only available to the visitor through the use of hanging headphones. Behind them, in total darkness, the figure of a woman covered in black clothes stares at us.
I'd like to leave you with a quote by Susan Sontag from “Under the sign of Saturn” that inspired the making of this piece.
“Allegory is the preferred method of writers and artists prone to indistinct, indecisive longing for a past that did not exist (sehnsucht). A fitting tribute to melancholia, allegory, imbued with a sense of the forbidden, is distinguished by the sense of having lost one’s way, a sense analogous to the disorientation and the loss of time. Thus allegory does not project a plan or proposal but is characterised in spatial and temporal terms as “a place where one gets lost”[…] The melancholic’s need to make whole that which has been shattered is exemplified by the haunting experience of imperceptible lack. Thus melancholic’s often exhibit the obsession of “the collector”, gathering and indexing to excess any number of things in a vain attempt to hold onto a world that does not appear to include them”
Hope you like it and as always comments are welcome!
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