FLESH WORLD
2015
The project reflects on what we are afraid of through references to Chilean and international popular culture, evoking the multiple conceptions of evil based on the traumatic memories of the post-dictatorship. The pieces seek to account for the restlessness of our constant comparison with the past and the undying expectation of an upcoming success, which in Chile seems to be realized through advertising and brief sports successes. The series of artworks of this project comprises a sound object, a light object, two video pieces, and a collage series. e posdictadura. Las piezas buscan dar cuenta de la inquietud por la incesante comparación con el pasado y las eternas expectativas de un éxito futuro, que en Chile sólo es materializado en publicidad y en fugaces logros deportivos. El conjunto de obra del proyecto está formado por un objeto sonoro, un objeto lumínico, dos piezas en video y una serie de collages.
The first object is a fan intervened with the disassembled VHS tapes of a pirated copy of Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939), with its screened scenes, which, when the device is turned on, becomes a sound object. Both videos proyected along with this sound device feature images stolen from internet and intervened during the post-production, creating a sort of diptych where both videos are formally and discursively juxtaposed. The first one features a reptile hatching and a snake digesting an egg; as metaphors of birth and self-destruction: a constant source of artistic production. While the second one shows excerpts taken from the world title fight of Carolina “Crespita” Rodriguez, a Chilean female boxer who holds the world bantamweight championship; a romantic scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1939); and the footage of a model ashamed of having fallen on the catwalk in the middle of a fashion show.
Video installation. Screened video [6’30” in loop], with sound object composed of a fun and VHS tapes.
The series of collages and video footage with amplified sound operates in the expositive space as it differs from the first video installation. The collages pieces belong to the interventions of pages taken from the Atlas of the Economic and Social Development of Chile, published in 1988 by the Military Geography Institute during the Pinochet military dictatorship, which pretends to bring out the economic, social and cultural advances of the country in the years following after the coup in 1973. The video is a new audio-visual collage that links a scene from the film The Naked Prey by Cornel Wilde (1965) to a short intro excerpt from one episode of the TV show Twin Peaks, by David Lynch and Mark Frost (1990-1991), whose incidental music, along with the sound of the tapes, surrounds the exhibition as a whole.
The exhibition of the project took place between July and August 2015 at the Galería Panam
[Santiago, Chile].
Photography exhibition by Jorge Brantmayer.
Video exhibition by Angie Saiz.