La Anástrofe de Nuestra Señora del Futuro

The work is presented in the form of a mythological narrative that consists of three differentiated scenes based on the use of images, a soundtrack and text. In the first part we are told the story of a visionary experience in the first person with an unknown narrator, but who appeals directly to the user. This part of the work consists of an apocalyptic science fiction story about how humanity manages to defeat Capital and embark on the process of creating a planetary consciousness. In the second scene, the narrative changes register, the work itself, through a divine figure, speaks to the user and places him in the place previously occupied by the narrator of the story. At this moment, the work stops being a first-person narrative and begins to be structured based on the interaction between divinity and the user. This is the kickoff for the third and final scene, where the user (now confused with the narrator) must decide what to make of this vision and what truth value to give it. It is at this point in the story that the user has the possibility of choosing how to end the proposed narrative and generating a series of alternative endings.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

César Aira understands that the fundamental characteristic of contemporary art is its renunciation of History “to unfold itself as a permanent present” (Aira, 2013:6). According to his analysis, contemporary art resigns itself from the central values ​​of what has been designated as modernism: “it is no longer assumed as a herald of the future, of the future development of time” (Aira, 2013:6). He is no longer interested in teleologies or the production of new values ​​or stories. More than as a realization of modernism or a plain and simple form of the present, contemporary art is timeless. If the idea of ​​the future disappears and History itself is called to an end, what is obtained is not a permanent present but the very dissolution of time or, as Aira says, its very confusion with space: a stratified universe of stages of contradictory formal tastes, but not mutually exclusive. In this framework, the present work seeks to recover the temporal dimension and, expressly, the notion of Future. What Aira omits from his analysis is that this end of history of which he speaks is not only the product of a technical reproducibility hopelessly confused with the original work, but is also a consequence of particular political and social circumstances: mainly of the defeat of alternative projects to capitalist hegemony (Fisher, 2013:25). Of this situation it seems that we only have a small echo when Aira concludes her essay with: “Who needs new values? Who needs values?” (Aira, 2013:11). In this sense, the work proposes to insert itself within the original modernist project, understood as the search for something radically other. The work uses elements of science fiction and utopian discourse to rehabilitate the idea of ​​a future, not built from the present, but as an invasion of or invocation from the present. If the present closes by itself in contemporary art, the only way it can be broken is if something opens it from the Outside. Hence the idea of ​​anastrophe as opposed to catastrophe (a future that assembles itself) or in this case a fiction (in the form of a visionary experience) that seeks to make itself real. For these reasons, throughout the work images from the most varied origins are taken up and recontextualized, trying to dissolve the line between reality and fiction. The work also recovers archaic ideas about images (their cultic and magical function) and combines them with modernist objectives. The appeal to Christian religious imagery, the apocalyptic story and the concept of apotheosis (the deification of the Earth and Humanity) are not gratuitous, they are objects of powerful use that, like the Egyptian bas-reliefs, have a magical power in themselves and can transform reality by themselves. (Gombrich, 1999:40, 58). Finally, and in direct line with the above, we can find that the performativity of the code of the work is analogous to the performativity of magical discourse. Both are characterized “by the fact that here “what is said” coincides with “what is done”” (Arns, 2005:5). These images and stories that the work offers us, as well as its code, are not a form of mimesis, but rather seek to directly affect and activate “the real and virtual spaces, in which we increasingly move and live” (Arns, 2005:5). In this way, the work functions, simultaneously, as a form of magical ritual, ecstatic religious experience and pulp science fiction story that seeks to bring the Future to us and break with the inertia of this eternal present in which we live.

Literature

Aira, César. ([2013], 2016). “Sobre el arte contemporáneo” en Sobre el arte contemporáneo. Buenos Aires: Literatura Random House, pp. 11-56. Arns, Inke. (2005). “El código como acto de habla performativo”. En Revista Artnodes, Julio de 2005, ISSN 1695-5951 Fisher, Mark. (2013). Los Fantasmas de mi Vida. Caja Negra. Gombrich, E. H. (1999). Historia del arte (16ª ed.). Editorial Diana.