Videos

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Ontological Politics #1 (Havel)

2013
Single-channel video in which a recurring dialogue is formed by fragments extracted from two seminal public addresses by Václav Havel, former dissident and essential player of post-soviet politics in Eastern Europe. Both of the lines used in this work are the closing arguments of Havel's New Year Addresses of 1990 and 1991, respectively. This persistent question posed by an individual in continuous doubt alludes to the extreme changes in global geopolitics once the Soviet Bloc fell, but also alludes to the sociopolitical crisis nowadays, both in the region and other parts of Europe. --- This video is part of Ontological Politics, an ongoing series of works in which the notions of political change and the pertinence of radical ideologies in our current sociopolitical climate are explored through brief videos. These works establish hypothetical parallels between diverse moments of conflict in contemporary history, creating a critical perspective of the way these ideologies are structurally and aesthetically conformed. The topics treated in this series range from specific incidents in specific disturbance scenarios, the future of dissidence, the nature of political violence and the aestheticization of protest, incorporating formal resources such as appropriated imagery and content extracted from diverse sources such as mass media, document archives, notorious political speeches and similar material, elaborating on a broad and disenchanted vision of the fissures that permeate social superstructures in the western world.
Added on: August 16, 2019

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Ontological Politics #4 (The Power of the Powerless)

2013
Single-channel video created through gradual interventions to the cover page of an original copy of a soviet-era samizdat edition of The Power of the Powerless, an expansive essay written in 1978 by Václav Havel. This text was suppressed at the time by the totalitarian regime that ruled Czechoslovakia before the Velvet Revolution. This text is an essential resource to understand the ideological framework of czech dissidence and its opposition to the Soviet Bloc. The content, banned by the Communist Party, spread in the form of samizdats, a self-publishing strategy that citizens of the eastern european country devised to confront the strict control of print materials that opposed the interests of the Soviet Regime. The possession of these materials was invariably punished by imprisonment. --- This video is part of Ontological Politics, an ongoing series of works in which the notions of political change and the pertinence of radical ideologies in our current sociopolitical climate are explored through brief videos. These works establish hypothetical parallels between diverse moments of conflict in contemporary history, creating a critical perspective of the way these ideologies are structurally and aesthetically conformed. The topics treated in this series range from specific incidents in specific disturbance scenarios, the future of dissidence, the nature of political violence and the aestheticization of protest, incorporating formal resources such as appropriated imagery and content extracted from diverse sources such as mass media, document archives, notorious political speeches and similar material, elaborating on a broad and disenchanted vision of the fissures that permeate social superstructures in the western world.
Added on: August 16, 2019

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The Anarchists and the Bombs

2012
Single-channel video in which a sign language specialist translates a 1907 text originally appeared in the seminal anarchist journal Tierra y Libertad, published in early twentieth-century Barcelona at the height of the Spanish Anarcho-syndicalist movement. Impaired communication, the failure of radical ideologies to affect the social structures they try to address and the revolting muteness of contemporary societies going through moments of crisis are key concepts to approach this work.
Added on: August 16, 2019

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Untitled (Feelings)

2007
Video shot with an original fully-functional music box with a resin-cast spinning Basque separatist figure, dancing to the tune of "Feelings" by Morris Albert.
Added on: August 16, 2019

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Vulnerable

2006
Text-based video identifying vulnerable points of the human body, along with detailed instructions on how to deliver an effective attack, disclosed from military techniques currently in use.
Added on: August 16, 2019

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Essays on reconstruction (Jose Marti)

Site-specific project, developed in El Pantanal, an under-developed settlement in process of regularization located in the outskirts of Granada, Nicaragua. The departure point for this project started with a brief analysis of the history of this community and the discovery of an architectonical plinth lost amidst tropical vegetation and the memory of the inhabitants. In order to recover the identity of this object, a series of interviews were conducted with the local population. This investigation was only led by physical memory and oral history, not through official records. The results of this research suggested that the remnants of this structure were built at some point between the fall of the Somoza dictatorship and 1992, and was meant to be a memorial for the cuban thinker, philosopher, poet and politician José Martí, later neglected. A community forum was started on-site, empowering the community and making them responsible of key aspects of the restoration, in the aesthetic and structural sense, in order to start the reconstruction process. The structure, previously in ruins, was restored with the full participation of a local group of women participating in a program for sustainable housing, implemented by the french non-profit organization Habitat-Cité. The resulting video work documents this process through a visual deconstruction of a complex social landscape in which themes such as identity, political ideology and the configuration of public space play a key role in the conformation of the work, reconverting itself into an exercise of communitarian resignification. After this process, the renovated monument represents not only a restored cultural signifier, but the sum of the experience of memory and shared responsibilities of a social collective in adverse conditions.
Added on: June 30, 2020