Juegos de herencia

Inheritance Games (2009)

Multichannel sound video installation, 24 minutes long, that explores the heritage of a celebration held every July 20th in the town of El Valle, Chocó. This celebration was brought by Spanish immigrants and assimilated by a community from the Colombian Pacific at the beginning of the 20th century. The installation of the work is supported by two polyptychs of 8 horizontal projections on boards, four on each side of the room, which at times are in dialogue and at others unfold and propose circular paths. There is a ninth circular projection on the floor on sand. Among the sounds of the work, the sound of the machete bursts into the air, echoes and resounds in the space with its own cultural voice, replicating itself beyond its own border.

It is a rite, as is clear in the decomposition of the actions: covering the eyes, digging, walking, wielding a machete. It is a collective ceremony of communion in destruction, of vital union in death.

Juegos de Herencia (monocanal), Cosmovideografías, CENART, Mexico, 2013.
Museo de Arte Moderno de Barranquilla, 2014.

Inheritance Games, Alonso Garcés Gallery. Bogota, 2011.

The work implies a reflection on what it means to make history or to think history, aspects that at this point must be indiscernible. Indeed, the role of sound and video, in this case, is oriented to reveal and intensify aspects of violence that at no time can be reduced to a single image, always maintaining the ambiguity latent in multiple appearances of the same phenomenon. For this reason, the reference to the spectral is important, because the understanding that every event is ambiguous leads us to think that the inheritance, the inherited, demands an appropriation from us.

Gustavo Gómez, philosopher

INSTALLATION

INSTALLATION DATA SHEET

Multichannel Video and Sound Installation
Nine simultaneous projections in synchrony
Sound: Dolby 5.1
Duration: 24 minutes
2011

MONO-CHANNEL TECHNICAL DATA SHEET

HD video. Stereo sound
Length: 7 minutes
2011

Creation grant. National University of Colombia. 2007-2008.
Production support: Alonso Garcés Galería, Bogotá.

EXHIBITIONS

-Liminal Retrospective, Miguel Urrutia Art Museum (MAMU), Bogota. 2019

–Museo de Arte Moderno de Barranquilla, Colombia, 2014.

-Monochannel video. Instants Video Festival Marselle, 50Ans dÁrt Video. France. 2013.

-Video mono channel. Instant Video Festival. Marseille, France. 2011

-Mono video channel. Latin American Cosmovideography, CENART. Mexico DF. 2011.

-Multichannel video installation and photography. Alonso Garcés Gallery. Bogotá. Solo exhibition. 2011.

-Stainless steel print. ArtBo Fair. Bogotá. 2009.

ARTICLES OF INTEREST

– The montage and the document: the (in)visible singularity. By: Juan Carlos Arias.
– The logic of the spectra and the technology of memory. By: Gustavo Gómez P.
– Photography as a strategy to tell horror stories of the Colombian conflict. By: Sonia Cogollo-Ospina.

SERIALS

This is a work that makes possible both a sensorial and conceptual experience, thanks to the sound and the blind manipulation of a machete on the defenseless head of a mute rooster. The artist says: “The use of the machete, a cultural tool for cultivation and for acts of violence in this country in past and recent times, resonated in my conscience, identifying its blow, its timbre as the axis of the project. I follow this tool to know its hidden sound, its strength and its threat”.

Sol Astrid Giraldo, philologist.