Un zapallo

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For the academy

This work is a consequence of the following texts: AIRA, César. ([2013], 2016). “On contemporary art” in On contemporary art. Buenos Aires: Random House Literature, pp. 11-56. (DAA: 1:02m). KAPROW, Allan. ([2015], 2016). “Happenings on the New York scene (1961)” in Between art and life. Essays on the happening. Barcelona: Alpha Decay, pp. 57-74. TAYLOR, Diana. (2012). “The new uses of performance” in Performance. Buenos Aires: Printed Matter, pp. 88-110. FRICKE, Christiane. (1999). “New Media”. In “AAVV. Art of the 20th century. Vol. II. München: Taschen. pp.576-590. GALANTER, Philip. (2011). “Between two fires: art-science and the war between science and humanities.” In Artnodes Magazine, November 2011, UOC, ISSN 1695-5951. ARNS, Inke. (2005). “The code as a speech act performative”. In Artnodes Magazine, July 2005, ISSN 1695-5951.

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For the final exhibition

This work is a reflection of the Multimedia Arts 1 course. In its rhizome root it unites all shared visions and experiences, which create a common work, a complex body. Each expression is just one of its many surfaces, and each surface reflects the images differently. Question, how do you evaluate something like this? What sense does it make to isolate the fragments and ignore the whole? Learning is collective, it intermingles by nature, like plants. Individualizing it is mutilation, correcting differences is repression. Thank you very much for not having done so.

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~ For the rest ~

This idea is an imagination of the story called “The pumpkin that became a cosmos” by Macedonio Fernández. Among all the metaphors produced by science fiction, a pumpkin destroying worlds seems to me to be one of the most accurate. It is timeless, it never runs out. It could happen right now, tomorrow afternoon, next millennium, or it could already happen and we live within it. It is disturbing (like a mirror) because it partly includes us and we are also squash; because in part it is foreign, a threat; because in part it is imitating us and completely surpasses us.

Be that as it may, we inhabit the residue of its growth, ghosts in the machine. I don’t believe in hope, that’s why I like this story. I copy the beginning here:

“Once upon a time there was a pumpkin growing alone in the rich lands of Chaco. Favored by an exceptional area that gave him everything, raised freely and without remedies, he developed with natural water and sunlight in optimal conditions, as a true hope of Life. Its intimate history tells us that it was feeding at the expense of the weakest plants around it, Darwinianly; I’m sorry to have to say it, making you unfriendly. But the external story is what interests us, the one that only the bewildered inhabitants of the Chaco who were going to find themselves wrapped in the squash pulp, absorbed by its powerful roots, could tell.