martin bonadeo | texts | fused americas

According to a physics law, two objects cannot be in the same space at the same time. The division between bodies or territories always is political and implies a shock. But, what happens when instead of confrontation there is fusion, two forms that join together to generate a new one?

A flag flutters in an artificial way; the abstraction of its forms and colors no longer represents the same values that in its origins, and it gets a new meaning day by day. A limit created by men, the power of a territory, a culture that defined the limits of its physical and symbolic body represented by patriotic forms and colors. Identity works like a magnet bringing together groups and dividing people that lives in side of the river, a mountain or an imaginary line like a parallel or a meridian, from the ones in the other. Faced neighbors or simply differentiated by a ordered, decreed and established political question settled by thinkers of a time in which the reason and the private property were the ideals.
Latin American nations are dominated by economic groups fighting for resources instead of traditions. We are symbolically poor countries without education to understand our position. Democracies defined by European parameters do not manage to give fruits for the inhabitants of these countries. With institutions in crisis and hunger, the limits and identities only serve to crowd people in a current account of debts with the I.M.F. The flags, these independence symbols gained with proud blood in diverse battles, today are loosing their reason to be in a symbolic war played in a battlefield distant from the physicist, in a world with a new way to delineate borders.

Which of these countries is independent? What is the meaning of our flags?

The computer transduce forms and the colors into numbers -bits- that can transform in quick arithmetical operations and generate new forms as bodies interacts with artificial limits. The mathematical operation is simple light colors addition and complex symbolical multiplication over the flags of the different nations. The symbols and forms that represent each country, are as arbitrary as random in computer's programs. The multimedia projector raises the concentration possibility: the flag like a screen functions as an inverted prism, the different colors and shapes transform into a total and even illumination that eliminates the shades, the vertices and the divisions. This is still a desire. Soon the flag is fluttering alone in its mast, without no technology more than the one of the iron and a textile ready to be loaded of a new sense.

To fuse: from Latin fundere, to found, a base to construct?

Another physics principle says that nothing is lost and everything must transform itself.

Buenos Aires, June 20th 2003

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