Artwork presentation

La Matanza atascada

Artist: Lucas Martelletti

Year 2021

Semester Second semester

Fecha December 1, 2021

The Stuck Matanza is a work of art in the form of a game belonging to the branch of artivism, and attempts to criticize the terrible current situation of the party that gives the copy its name. To this end, the user can navigate between different crime scenarios caused by lack of care on the part of officials. To win you must throw blank tickets at them and have them collide with them.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

The work was developed on the p5js platform, including multimedia materials (images and sounds). Being a game, it includes a menu developed through conditionals and limitations made by measurements. The menu includes 3 options: the game, information about the scenarios and instructions. When playing you can switch between different real crime scenes and characters. The objective is to reach 10 points, colliding the blank ballots against the enemies 10 times. If the object does not collide, a life will be lost; upon reaching 0, the game ends.

The objective of the work is not to offend a political party, but rather to criticize individual officials. The blank ballots make an obvious representation of how to combat politicians through democracy. As a last point to emphasize, the work is an attempt to imitate performance, the ambient noise and the places want to simulate this type of mass art, which lacks censorship or conditions, since it is an art free of companies, it is organized by the people.

Conceptually it is based on the 3 given texts of Diana Taylor: “What are the antecedents of performance art”, “The new uses of performance”, “Artivists”. I propose the first relationship with Artivism. The work makes a clear political critique, which according to Taylor, is the nature of performance. It seeks to break the relationships of the people with the officials through affective means (measure of “functioning” of this art, the more feeling it generates, the greater the success).

The other anchor with the text is with Taylor’s approach to our virtual life. “Technological transformations offer new obstacles and new opportunities for expression,” “We live simultaneously in a “real” world and in a “virtual” one.” The work is a clear example of this and has that intention. It seeks to help people express those emotions generated by these situations through the virtual, through games. The objective is to be able to express that subjectivity and those critical tensions that Taylor talks about, generated by social situations, in order to be able to bring those real feelings into a peaceful virtual expression.

Finally, Taylor warns that performing can both challenge and sustain systems of power. What is popular can be commodified, and is no longer a free art form. Here our author raises the importance of constantly renewing these expressions. The work comes to bring that temporary renewal, bringing the non-profit and unconditional video game (relatively new medium) to the realm of political protest.

Biography