Videosessions

These texts are a companion for the videos of the projection sessions. The three private sessions were performed in my room during August of 2023. Basically, a setup of frames and hung fabric was exposed to the projector images, moved by me like a camera, through the room(s). The material projected was produced through different media. Each session lasted 1 hour and a half approximately. The first session explored "The Funerals of Atahualpa", a painting by Luis Montero. For this video I recorded a digital drawing copy I made of the original painting and then processed it to be projected over a group of canvas stretchers, some books about art history were placed over them. Books about Rubens, whose works were copied across the colonial south, and a book about Titian, who portrayed Charles V so many times. A book about Velazquez, the artist at the helm of the Spanish Empire in the 17th century. A book about Durer, who appreciated the delicacy of the New World metalwork. The second one explores the idea of technological expiation of guilt, where a character appears to be seated in a dark room after we see a washing machine circle contemplated in the way of Bosco's work. The third explored the idea of a revelation in the unexpected, in the mundane. For this, I fabricated pseudo-creatures with clothes torn and mashed up. These videos were also projected over the wall. These texts are accompanying the videos taken and edited after the sessions. This work was part of practice development during the RCA CASS course, led by Despina Zacharopoulou and Billy Klotsa-Vasiliki Antonopoulou.

1

Western art is an occupied space. A system used to represent power. As all systems do. But I used it happily, remorselessly. I studied drawing. And perspective. And composition. And gouache. I know, I know the wars between Charles V of Germany and I of Spain, portrayed luxuriously by Titian, against Francis I of France, portrayed by Jean Fouquet, and the link between the former and his Burgundy legacy. I know the complex scenes of the Thirty Years War, the battle of the White Mountain and the King of one Summer and the names of Eugene of Savoy and Gustavo Vasa, Wallenstein and Colbert and Foucault and the Conde-Duque of Olivares, portrayed dutifully with the sprezzatura of a bohemian brushwork by Velazquez, and the name of Rubens, of Van Eyck, of Durer, all of who I have studied and memorized. It was in heavy volumes of history, of the history, the universal history centred mostly in the history of European empires and dynasties. Naive as I am, I accepted this title blindly, only until my most sagacious friend let me know the faulty use of the term "universal". I was not that perceptive. Not like Durer who is his trip to Antwerp saw the delicate orphebrery of the New World and admired it in its delicacy without prejudging the nature or condition of its artisans, not questioning if they had a soul. Anyway, the story of the books. That was not my story. We never appear there in more than two or three lines. Just like in the FIFA World Cup, or the world news. The world was not a scenario for us. History and Art are things that happen somewhere else. The chiaroscuro, the perspective, the rules and proportions of anatomy, all the carefully reproduced plates of the art history books, the Renaissance, the modern art, all happened there, not here. There. A place we knew only by reference and where we lived, however, in our minds. The west was a borrowed space. We thought we were Westerners but we were not. We were not Eastern either. The east was a mythical place, as was Africa, and India. Who were we? It was easier to know the meaning of Las Meninas than to learn the names of local artists in the 19th century. Merino, Laso, Montero. It was easier to see a painting in a printed magazine than in real life. Western art was learned kaleidoscopically, as a reflection of a reflection, deformed in the process. Always has been like that. That is our default starting point. From the Flemish engravings copied in reverse and amplified. Like when you give an image to an AI and this image rebuilds or fills the gaps as best as it can. Noise and default converge. To create again, a tectonic misreading that creates a native geology of aesthetic molding. Form follows function but the meaning gets twisted following that form in search of a function that is new to the aforementioned form, a form in search of a function in a new place that is unknown, a Tinder mismatch of form and function. Swap left, swap right, swap to the extremes, to achieve something in the middle of the uncertainty. This place- the place of figurative realism- can be squatted, but is still a borrowed space.

2

Oh traveller, you must stay three days in our place, and then you must leave. The journey must continue. But how long can you escape? Of yourself. How long? Add to this, the fact that here you are merely a guest. Do you have it? That is the guilt and remorse of being other. Must you ask yourself: What have you done? As you are the other that is using space, consuming air, breathing the resources of someone else, namely the main characters that warrant you the guilt of being, of not speaking the language, of being on a temporal visa, of having left behind the place that has been geographically, historically and economically assigned to you. The guilt must be washed. Technically, technologically. Parasitic beings. They float and they occupy a borrowed space, as long as they are welcome. A washing machine. In the underground, the washed remains, Learn your place. Oh, traveller, you must remember who you are, for you are the ghost in the machine. Use the mask. The mask will allow you to remain, as long as you use it, you will remain. The mask hides the fault lines in your existence, and the mask allows you to communicate with us. It is your new language, your new voice, your new name, your appearance and your surface that is the only thing we can see and we care about. Your inner, bubbling, noisy side is just the noise of the liquid convolutions of the washing machine. The guilt has been washed away, but you must stay still and not move. Only the machine can move. You dreamed a dream. That's all. Oh, traveller, you dreamed a dream and know you must continue your journey, somewhere else.

3

Epiphany in the storage room. A revelation, an illumination, an opening to a realm that is denied to the beings submerged in oblivion. The storage room, out of the main walking path of the house, the room of the house reserved for the unconscious, to the hidden nature of our life transfigured in the objects that are needed and used but that can be sumptuously and disdainfully hidden from the front side of our lives. Out of sight, out of mind. If a tree falls and nobody witnesses it, has the tree really fallen? In their moment under the spotlight, strange creatures appear, abyssal, recycled, in the space when you illuminate it, they have been hiding there, multi-formed, alternative, clandestine, anomalous. The world is not a scenario for them, except when the illumination reveals something crazy, absurd or bizarre that happened, and just happened to be here, since the other is a revelation in the sideways, in the humid, cold, dampened storage room, in the liminal appearance of the forgotten lane. And yet, every system has a backchannel to save face. The keystone is the stone that has been discarded but is used to calibrate the projector. For the wanderers, marauding hikers of the solitude and the loneliness of the empty spaces there is something alluring in this presence of an absence that suddenly reveals itself not to be such absence but actually an uncharted presence.? The other is the unexpected apparition that triggers, the epiphany of light firing the darkness around the silence of the neglected scenery. Behind the scenes. Behind the scenes, the facade. The backdoor, a door nevertheless. The alternative channel of the epigonal statement of creation. A bureaucratic detour that reveals the unconscious bias of the phenomena. The seduction of the pre-being, eternally signed as the other life, the afterlife and the alter life, the fulcrum that has been quashed from the fruit and is left out. The washing machine, the frames, the crucial back end. In the mundane, there is space for the light. The uncertainty is a revelation appearing in the middle of the pedestrian scenery of daily life, in the so-called mundane.