Exhausted can still fight
Exhausted can still fight (2000)
The spectator enters an exhibition hall and instead of feeling inside, he feels outside because the most powerful stimulus he receives are the images coming from macro screens referring to cockfighting and its own scenario, the cockfighting ring. This alternation of spaces is interrupted again and again by the soundtrack, true references that drag us to other parts and dragging us, drags us also to the war.
Excerpt from the catalog, Carlos Jiménez (art critic).
EXHAUSTO AÚN PUEDE PELEAR, nominated for the II Luis Caballero Award, Santa Fe Gallery, 2000.
In this piece, the artist does not stop at the image, but involves the space and time of this popular practice, treating the rooster, the feathers, the feet, the pecks, the spurs, the noises, the party, the colors and the arena as a single, complex event that is brought into the exhibition room. He achieves this by transmuting the event into a sensorial, acoustic, temporal experience. This goes beyond the direct allusion to a popular and ancestral practice, to present itself as the sensorial experience of violence. It is not so much asking what this event can mean, but to establish “what happens there”.
It is an observatory “of the formal nature of the violent”, as Echeverri would say. A violence that is a party and the unfolding of an identity in this hysterical orgy where our symbols reiterate once again our identity affirmed around death. Echeverri manages here to find the rhythm that accounts for the nature of the violent. That theatricalization of excess, that gloating in the signs of death.
Sol Astrid Giraldo, philologist
TECHNICAL DATA SHEET
Site-specific project.
Four projections on curved supports
forming two arcs in space.
Video dimensions: 4.3
Year: 2000
Two forms of exhibition:
A. Video installation
B. Flat screen.
Duration: 13min
Sound: 5.1
Nominated II Luis Caballero Award, Santa Fe Gallery, 2000.
ARTICLE OF INTEREST
– Annotations for an agonic topology. By: Carlos Jiménez.
SOUND
The oversized noise of the spur spreads powerfully over the space it generates. It repeats itself incisively, without attenuating: like a pure blast of destruction that kills any attempt at language. The audio-spectator has no choice but to listen to this devastating sound, charged with memories.
IMAGES OF THE INSTALLATION
The arena of the circus of bulls, as well as that of the henhouse or the kennel, the historical substitutes of the Roman circus, are circular. That is to say, the place of duels in the Western tradition is a circle, and that of these roosters is evidently a territorial duel. What is there in dispute and at stake is a territory. And this construction always refers us to a matter of power.
IMAGES OF THE WORK
