martin bonadeo | texts

The compass states an irreversible link between the South and a descendent arrow that is symbolically oppressing for us. We act every day from this polar situation accepting without complains unfair values and standards. An electromagnet cheats this statement and opens a new alternative: a doubt, a question. From this place we can start plotting our own language, a conscious and awake one. Where some see the sunset, others see a sunrise, where some see poverty, others see wealth, where some see oppositions others see a cycle's synthesis.

Los Angeles, june 2004

comment on NEWS (it is not)
by graciela taquini, show's curator

In “NEWS (It is not)” Martin Bonadeo points out that “abstracted from a clock and a cardinal point, sunset and sunrise looks almost the same, loosing the spatial temporal reference and the symbolism of birth and death”. The formal and iconographic paradoxes, the spatial polarity, the strange experience of a landscape deranged by randomness, turn this piece into something more than a geopolitics metaphor.

about paradox
by graciela taquini

Vertigo is “on the other side". There is a need to get in a state that oscillates between attraction, desire, insecurity and restlessness. It's not intended to turn the experience of its passage in a refuge; paradox is the engine that builds up each landmark. Since it is stating more questions than answers, a spiral sensation drives its sense; when it seems like arriving to a certain point, a new twist appears.

According to Gilles Deleuze, in Logic of sense, paradoxes are the passion of thinking, in my case, the topic of appearances has become an obsession. Vertigo is based in my own contradictions, but also in the ones of my society. At the same time I'm interested in generating an unforgettable experience. To achieve this goal I've been diving in blurry memories of my early childhood: the sound of a matraca in a resurrection mass while black clothes were falling and altars were lighting. Also mi astonishment at Alfred Hitchcock movies. Vertigo's most recent roots are a video randomly bought in a museum that happened to be the history of Marcel Duchamp's Étant Donée. The impact at K.Y.D., a video art piece by Jon Mikel Euba (Spain) and Eduardo Kac's (Brazil) web site Transporting an Unknown, that we will confront in his next visit.

The argentine artists traveling with me in this iniciatic trip to nowhere are Martin Bonadeo, Nushi Muntaabski and Augusto Zanela. These site specific installations built for the contemporary space of the museum where conceived from the challenges of MalBA's sacred enclosure with its technological potentialities. These ephemeras creations multiply exponentially the ambiguity's esthetic through its authors styles and obsessions.

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