Caer no es callar
Falling is not being silent is a work that is drawn on a digital canvas generated by code in real time. It combines image, sound, text and movement to generate a sensitive, political and chaotic experience. The piece includes typographic cutouts of real headlines about femicides and violent phrases towards women, which appear randomly once the user clicks anywhere on the screen, producing visual and sound saturation. By holding down a key, the cutouts fall, the background changes, and the sound stops, introducing a gesture of resistance and transformation. The work seeks to make gender violence and the impact of media messages on women’s bodies visible. Through the accumulation of headlines and the sudden drop, the piece reflects the intensity, repetition and saturation of this violence in our daily lives, a feeling that women experience every day, at the same time that it proposes a symbolic gesture of resistance and memory in the face of these injustices.
Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development
At first I was a little lost as to what to do, but I understood that this topic is going through me and I needed to approach it from a personal place. That’s why I decided to work on something that would allow me to express a position and, at the same time, open a space for reflection. I do not seek to generate a specific reaction in whoever observes, because each person approaches the work from their own experience. I am more interested in the viewer being able to stop and look, that this simple gesture enables a pause in the face of repeated and naturalized discourses about women.
On a conceptual level, I was interested in exploring the relationship between art, language and action. As Inke Arns states, “code can be understood as a performative act, a language that does things.” In my work, the code not only generates the image but also produces a gesture: with each click or key pressed, a change is activated that transforms the visual and symbolic meaning of what is seen. Following his approach to Software Art and Generative Art, the code becomes an active participant that establishes a dialogue with the user and with the work itself, generating unpredictable results and constituting the experience as something dynamic and in constant transformation. I can also relate this idea that a minimal action can generate a significant variation with what César Aira mentions about contemporary art as “an exercise in thinking in movement, which does not seek to represent reality, but to think about it from another place.”
From an aesthetic point of view, the work combines digital cutouts, headline typography and sounds to build an atmosphere of tension and disorder. The initial chaos is dismantled when the cutouts fall and the image of a woman appears holding a sign that says “this sign is as stupid as the justice of this country.” That moment of change concentrates anger, memory and collective strength, and leaves open the possibility of thinking about other forms of resistance from the sensitive and shared.
As for my personal experience, working on this work was intense and necessary. It allowed me to confront difficult emotions, reflect on the violence that goes through us and translate it into something tangible and visual. It was liberating to be able to transform a topic that impacts me personally into a piece that invites reflection, without imposing answers or readings. Following Arns’ idea about the performativity of the code, I feel that the work functions as an active space where each action of the viewer produces visible and symbolic effects. At the same time, it resonates with Aira: the piece proposes a thought in movement, where sensitivity and action meet, becoming a space of resistance and collective expression.
Literature AIRA, César. ([2013], 2016). “Sobre el arte contemporáneo” en Sobre el arte contemporáneo. Buenos Aires: Literatura Random House, pp. 11-56. (DAA: 1:02m) ARNS, Inke. (2005). “El código como acto de habla performativo”. En Revista Artnodes, Julio de 2005, ISSN 1695-5951