La lógica de la supervivencia [The logic of survival, 2008] 5'17” Gabriela Golder

The pain is elsewhere. I watch the images again. The distribution is elsewhere. The logic of survival is not related with hunger, but with fear and desperation. It is a sort of guarded carnival, where the poor vent their unreleased rage on a territory inhabited by the hopeless. This video is composed by only three scenes. 1. The mass’ gesture: a crowd rushing towards the food. It is sacking time. Afraid of having his bussines destroyed, a salesman throws food into the streets so that a desperate crowd pounces on it. 2. A young man is brutally repressed. The limits show by force to a man separated from the group. The police drag him while the young man tries to escape, to resist the repression. Survive. This scene is endlessly repeated and it is within this repetition that the meaning of the action is built: the nonsense. 3. The invisible power which is transfered for a while to the hands of some of the chosen ones. (The Others. The Same ones). Grotesque wealth distribution: some people throw bags of food from trucks. They are the others but also the same ones. The epilogue is very brief, the story is circular.
http://www.gabrielagolder.com/LALOGICA.html

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XX II y párvulos [XX II and infants, 2007] 7’32” + 2’57” by Regina José Galindo 10’32”

Performance by Regina José Galindo in which 52 gravestones are placed for the John Does (XX) buried in the graveyard “La Verbena” in Guatemala. “Death is a taboo for the majority of human beings, everywhere around the world, in every culture, even more for current Western culture. Death is the last trip, our unavoidable destiny. Becoming aware of it may serve us as a life stimulant. The contemplation of death and overcoming the fear of it will lead us to confront our own existence in a better way. In countries where extreme violence has become part of the common life, death is faced in a different manner. With no conscience, without any kind of respect, death has become an act of pure coldness, the image of the decadence of our society and the consequence of the absolute loss of the human being’s essential basic values. In Guatemala, death is seen as a red note, like a headline. Only in the capital city, between 10 and 15 people are killed daily; and between 2 and 4 people, are buried daily as XX. With extreme peaks, like, for example, what happened on Friday, July 22nd, when 14 people such a XX were buried. The moment of death is the same for everybody, regardless of age, social status or gender. However, we are all afraid of death, and even more, of the idea of dying with nobody wailing for us, completely alone, without any kind of ritual, closer to a dog’s death. Going through life and ending it without a single trace. The act of placing gravestones was conceived with the aim of giving a place, in death, to those human beings. A total amount of 52 gravestones were placed in the graveyard of “La Verbena” in Guatemala, partly modifying the space. Beneath every single gravestone a corpse can be found, a corpse which once was full of life. Nobody knows his name, nobody knows his face, yet nobody will be able to deny his existence.
http://www.reginajosegalindo.com/xx.html
http://madc.ac.cr/galerias/videos/galindo/index.html

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11 de septiembre [September 11th, 2002] 5’30” Claudia Aravena

11 September 1973, military coup in Chile. The video explores the transtextuality of the memory, through an implicit piece of criticism to mass media and their representation of violence. The gap between those two aspects and the fracture between current memory and historical past represent the meeting point of this video. With texts by Marguerite Duras (from Hiroshima mon amour), Salvador Allende “Último comunicado” (“Last speech” September 11th 1973, Magallanes Radio), and Claudia Aravena.
http://www.continentevideo.com.ar/ejercicios/claudiaes.html
http://www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/videobrasil/site/dossier024/obras.asp

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Superhéroes [Superheroes, 2004] 1’42” Luz María Bedoya

Video filmed in Ollantaytambo, small Inca town in the Andes from Southern Peru, during the celebration of New Year’s Eve 2003-2004. While we hear the voices of the recently elected representants of the new local government taking the customary oath in the town’s main square, we see kids playing “target shooting” with old army weapons turned into toys so as to shoot superhero figures.
http://www.luzmariabedoya.com/web%20ESP%20ING/proyectos/superheroes/super%20texto.htm

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Soldados de Cristo [Christ’s soldiers, 2004] 6’ José Alejandro Restrepo

Appropriated images showing the sinister bonds between the priests and the army; between Catholic faith and violence, between religion and war. “Our culture, our violence, everything is related to religion. My work doesn’t try to provoke, but to highlight the processes influenced by the Church and by the religious imagery, present in our society”. José Alejandro Restrepo.
http://www.cambio.com.co/culturacambio/775/ARTICULO-WEB-NOTA_INTERIOR_CAMBIO-4149550.html
http://projects.design.ucla.edu/freewaves/freewaves02/restrepoicomonia.mov

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Poli II (1999) 1’26” Yoshua Okón

Oríllese a la orilla [Park next to the walkway] is composed by a series of six videos in which the policemen of Mexico City are recorded in different situations and with a degree of manipulation. En Poli II, with the help of a walkie-talkie, Okón taps a radio conversation between two policemen while, sitting in their patrol cars, they talk about their plans to invite some women to have sex. http://www.yoshuaokon.com/works/orillese_orilla/video/
http://www.freewaves.org/festival_2002/artists/okon_y.htm
http://www.yoshuaokon.com/works/orillese_orilla/video/poli2.html

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Aranjuez (2003) 4’ Gonzalo Lebrija

Aranjuez took place during 2002 World Cup in a public square of Mexico City. At first glance, it seems a scene simultaneuously festive and disturbing that broadcasts the sense of the celebration with a slight tone of underlying tension. However, if we pay more attention, we will see a girl trying to walk among a crowd of young supporters who stalk her, turning the situation into a deeply unpleasant game. The artist has recorded this situation, firstly confusing, then terrifying, from a flat roof: the crowd that celebrates the football match ends up physically attacking some teenage girls. The soundtrack is “El Concierto de Aranjuez” by the master Joaquin Rodrigo, a music traditionally related to Spain which caricatures it as the land of fighting bulls and bullfights and which adds a disturbing tone to the work. Social, physical and psychological spaces collide, while the violent tendency implicitly appears in the collective behavior.
http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/programme/past/event/3/selected_works/

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Cañón de carne [Fodder cannon] 4’ Valeria Andrade and Pedro Cagigal. Serie Prácticas suicidas [Suicidal practices Series, 2006]

A young girl walks impassively through the streets among the compliments and obscenities shouted by men as she passes by. The sound reproduces the call of a girl to the hope phone line of Quito and the astonishing conversation she has with the speaker. “The dynamics of the inverted reality is born from our constant carnival –the laughter—where the order is upside down. The beginning and the afterwards remain chaotic, the starting point of all the possible and imaginary worlds. Every production possibility that appears in the disorder and the game relaxes and amuses, stinks and enrages at the same time, without preventing process and substantial results from taking place. It is then that taking into account again the carnival liturgy of death and resurrection, unbreakable and essential extremes, I practice the frank disobedience and the desire release. I become attached to the breaking-off the boundaries of the self for the assertion of a strict monomania and I intervene in the conflictive space with the aim of crossing the lines with my own body. I take up again physical urban habits in order to conquer public space and to get into its plots unexpectedly by means of the metaphor, the game, or the complaint, taking, as a suicidal, all the risks through the bitter end” Valeria Andrade.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBAKJdyNhgk

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Body Art (2008) 8’ Javier Castro, Luis Gárciga and Grethell Rasúa

In the streets of Havana an illegal sale of Viagra pills takes place, a strong stimulant that increases the virile prowess. This bussiness becomes the axis of the documentary record proposed by its authors. A study of the current Cuban collective subconscious through the comparison between sexual reality and its mythical dimension is carried out on Saint Valentine’s Day, also known in the island as Lovers Day.
http://www.trianglearts.org/batiscafo/catalogo.php?id=17
http://salonkritik.net/06-07/2008/03/ni_bolivianos_ni_cubanos_simpl.php