direction

Starting from travel documentary material as a basis for research, DIRECTION maintains as a concept the action of always being in motion and in one direction; a single journey with decisions along the way. The images do not try to show tourist destinations or narrate a journey, but the movement itself, its continuity. The sound is dislocated, out of sync with the original record, evoking or creating other senses.

The decision to include or not loop repetition when exhibiting the work also affects its meaning: the journey ends or begins again.

Single-channel video, seven minutes long (2008/2009)

balances

A man, a woman, each alone in a white room, apply trial and error to find different balances for a mobile made of personal pronouns. Their times are subjective, sometimes unfolded. It is an intimate, mental ritual. An always unstable attempt to materialize binding positions.

The mobile (“Relationator”) has something of an old sociogram and a lot of homage to Calder and kinetic art. As a piece, it is in itself an independent and scalable work, which was mounted in interactive mode (53rd National Hall of Visual Arts, Montevideo, and the Exhibition Center of the City of Buenos Aires, between 2007_2009)

Loop video, 21 minutes. Actors: Natalia Chiarelli and Mario Ferreira. Originally exhibited as part of the EXISTIR triptych.

another twist

In a cemetery there are some hourglasses that could also be urns with ashes. Some are small, handy; others are large, cannot be moved by one person. All are subject to the disposition of those who pass by or undertake the task.

Here time is real. Death is a job for the living.

(Shooted in the Central Cemetery of Montevideo with the actors Pepe Ramallo, Aline Rava, Til Silva, Cristina Techera and Emilio Gallardo.)

Loop video, 19 minutes, exhibited as part of the EXISTIR triptych, 2007.

no claims

An endless treadmill is running, empty, or carrying suitcases, or babies. A constant rhythm does not stop and is the pulse of the work.

Sometimes there are people waiting to collect the luggage. It is an action that can be as stirring and confusing as it is routine. Equally hopeful and distressing. Like a birth, like all births.

(Shooted at Carrasco Airport, with the participation of many volunteers).

Loop video, 14 minutes, originally shown as part of the EXISTIR triptych (2007).

being

Simultaneity is one of my obsessions, and in ESTAR it is not random. BEING is a subjective position. Relative. A state of becoming as almost the only certainty. ESTAR is transitive, as opposed to be. I live – and therefore I create – being part of a complex and wonderful experience to which I apply myself with bewilderment and fascination. I’m on it. That is in my work. I share the idea that art is an experience or it is nothing: No matter which form it takes, a work is an eventuality. It is produced and recreated in an encounter where there are only protagonists, and an installation does nothing but maximize this phenomenon. As in other works of mine, travels appear, but in this one I have also put my body very much in the first person.

Video triptych, silent, 8 minutes. Exhibited at the CCE (2004) and at the 52nd National Exhibition of Visual Arts (2006/7)

a try

A plant takes a self-portrait. Each flash marks a new attempt to fix an image, an identity. At first glance the situation seems absurd because it is a living being that supposedly has no awareness of itself or of time, a privilege that we reserve for other species, but immediately we can identify with that failed and presumptuous, useless impulse to represent ourselves.

Loop video, 1 minute, exhibited as a welcome monitor in the video installation of the ESTAR triptych (2004).

souvenirs

Light years in a few meters or in many miles, they are all relative simultaneities. A poster, a curtain, a square or a body are ways of finding beauty, but also visual writing resources.

Souvenirs is a tributary product of travel, but from some at the antipodes of the “excursion” that literally means “run outside”. As a rite of repetition, it is an invitation to stop. And follow.

Video installation of six channels, variable durations. (2003)

the recovery of innocence

Based on explicit male nude photographs taken for free from different internet sites and treated as drawings, this work recovers masculinity as an object of desire. Words with “H” for man in Spanish, provide universal meanings and emphasize relativity, because the “H” in Spanish is silent. The soundtrack contains emblematic male voices in three resignified songs. As well as a hedonistic act, it is a personal reaction to the extreme paucity of discourse (or the enormous amount of silence) that continues to exist in our midst about sexual diversity, particularly in art. The visibility of desire makes us free, vulnerable, human, full of colors, and reminds us that gender is just a game. One that we all have to play, but we tend to take it too seriously.

Single channel video, 5 minutes, (2005)

atrapadanzas / dancecatcher

I confess that for me this is a strange but beloved audiovisual product, made to be exhibited at the Montevideo Videodance Festival in 2004. It is rather in the form of a narrative short film in homage to the independence of fiction when it comes to life, as in “The Purple Rose of Cairo”, Woody Allen’s unforgettable film that is a love song to cinema.

Made with the support of friends and colleagues, with all the professional effort, however, I consider it a failed work basically due to my inexperience in directing actors and because it takes on an absurd and even humorous effect that was not intentional. Maybe I took it too seriously. It remains as a lovable attempt to film fiction, that time can help put into perspective or that may be versioned later on.

far from the original

Gestural narrative exercise, in which three young friends put into play, around a group photograph, the dynamics of approach and separation that is possible for them. After a series of unwise decisions, the testimony of the original bond between the three of them is materially lost in a by no means accidental oblivion.

Fiction short film, silent, 4 minutes. (1993, digitally remastered in 2005) Exhibited at La Movida, Cabildo de Montevideo, and later at the CCE within the exhibition “The video condition”, 2007.