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UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Some things remain / Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58z208b0 Author Guerra Cota, Aldo Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Some Things Remain A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts by Aldo Guerra Cota Committee in charge: Professor Louis Hock, Chair Professor Luis Alvarez Professor Anya Gallacio Professor Michael Trigilio 2014 The Thesis of Aldo Guerra Cota is approved and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2014 iii The space within us reaches out, translates each thing. For the essence of a tree to be real for you, cast inner space around it, out of the space that exists in you. Encircle it with restraint. It has no borders. Only in the realm of your renouncing can it, as a tree, be known. R.M. Rilke, Uncollected Poems,1924 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page………..……………………………………………………..……iii Epigraph……………………………………………………………………………iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………….v List of Figures…...…………….……………………………….………………....vi Abstract of the Thesis………………....………………………………………..vii Project Description….…………………..…………………………………….…..1 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………22 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Gallery View A ..…………..……………………………………...…..…2 Figure 2: Still image from video composite…………………..……………..…3 Figure 3: Sample page from notebook………………….………………………5 Figure 4: Oscar Muñoz “Project for a Memorial”, 2005……………………...7 Figure 5: Gallery View B…..…………………………………………………..…7 Figure 6: Tijuana’s local newspaper “Frontera” of Feb. 15th 2014………...9 Figure 7: Nina Pereg “RoundAbout Tel-Aviv”, 2007….…………………….11 Figure 8: Santiago Sierra “250cm line tattooed on 6 paid people” 2000...16 Figure 9: Sophie Calle “Take Care of Yourself”, Venice Biennale, 2007..19 vi ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS Some Things Remain by Aldo Guerra Cota Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts University of California, San Diego, 2014 Professor Louis Hock, Chair A multimedia project revolving around a video performance composed of a two channel video installation, an audio track, and the display of hand written notes, all revolving around the reconstruction of the last hours in the life of a recently deported man who committed suicide by climbing to an electrical tower in the city of Tijuana. A fusion of the collective memory of his gesture with my personal memory, where by means of digital manipulation I take this man's place atop the tower for 310 minutes. The idea is to take this incident as a point of departure to create an abstract and fragmented portrait of the city, as this man's virtually non-existing memory fuses with my own. vii Project Description “Some Things Remain” is a multimedia project revolving around a video-performance that references a recently committed -and upsettingly spectacular- public suicide: A man who had just been deported to Mexico, climbed to the top of an electrical tower in the main power plant in the city of Tijuana, where he stood for 5 hours and 10 minutes before finally leaping to his death. While not ignoring the significance of the loss of his life, this work focuses on the metaphysical elements of the event: psychological and physical endurance, history and memory, ephemerality and permanence, literal and symbolical changes in perspective, of prejudice and common place around issues of identity and the city as a constructed image. The work presented here is composed of a two-channel video installation, an audio track and the display of a series of photographed pages containing hand-written notes created by me during a performance where I symbolically take the suicidal man’s place atop the tower for a total of 310 minutes between the hours of 5am and 10:10 am, the same hours of the day as the tragedy/event originally happened. 1 2 The piece described above was achieved by means combining two video shots. First I recorded the towers at the site of the incident for five continuous hours, starting at dawn. Then, at a different outdoor location atop a squared-foot surface that corresponded with the top of the tower, I did a shoot where I matched the lighting, perspective, distance, and angle of the first video, again from 5 to 10:10 am, and without interruption. I then digitally composited the two videos to create a simulation of me standing on the tower. The resulting film runs for the entire 5 hours and 10 minutes, and it is the central image of the show, both conceptually and formally, as it projects on a 12 feet by 25 feet vertical paper screen that hangs from floor to ceiling in the gallery. Figure 1. Gallery View A 3 Figure 2. Still image from video composite. The rest of the images in the show are delivered through my writing, which I conceived as the way to provide a subjective perspective of the passing of time -one that the camera’s point of view could not- or better stated: writing was the way of recording my 'internal state'. At the 4 same time, this rather massive display of writing acknowledged the practical impossibility that any spectator would experience the video piece in its entire length, and so here the writing functions as the first evidence of the passing of time. Nonetheless, the most important part of the entire gesture (writing while taking this man’s place) was to make a particular portrait of the city. Throughout the duration of the performance, I mentally reconstructed my city, that is, the city as I am able to remember it by means of continuously, and almost automatically writing on a small 'memo' notepad. Done mostly in a descriptive language that depicts visions, the resulting notes are the accumulation of memories of the spaces, objects, and places in the city that I was able evoke during the recreation of the last hours of this man's life. These pages where then photographed, transcribed, translated, printed and framed to be displayed individually next to each other, forming an extremely long line across the wall, as the stated second and subjective way of experiencing time. It is also a more immediate way, as one can see at a glance the remnants of an evidently time-consuming activity, in this case, the writing spread through the 60 pages of the notebook, each annotated with the exact time it was written at. 5 Figure 3. Sample page from notebook What are displayed are to-scale reproductions of the unbound notepad. This 'distance' from the real object used for the writing, and the several iterations of the actual referent, by means of manipulation, simulation, or translation, is not just a technicality or a stylistic solution, but a part of my most deliberate interest in exploring every medium's role in the creation of meaning and how it affects, limits, or expands it. This is present not just in the photographed representation of the notebook, but in the video, the paper screen, and the constant concealing of other elements in order to problematize their validity as documents, yet 6 perhaps simultaneously increasing our understanding of that which they service to communicate. In a similar manner, Columbian artist Oscar Muñoz -who works mainly in video and photography- deals not only with the difficulties of addressing the political issues affecting his immediate context, but he does it in way that introduces the medium’s conflicting nature by bringing processes of disintegration into the work, that is, he puts forth the ephemeral characteristics of the projected and the printed image. Having made most of his work in the city of Cali during the 90’s, a time of heightened struggle with the drug cartel’s and narco related violence, he managed to develop an important body of work on the specificities of his circumstance, that in a broader sense, always evidenced oblivion. As curator Gonzalo Ortega, explains: The political sense —if it exists— in the work of Oscar Muñoz, is to go beyond that which the images show on first looking at them; it alludes to its temporality and specific materiality to dismember them…”1 1 Gonzalo Ortega. Introductory text for the Muñoz’ retrospective at MARCO Museum of Monterrey, 2014. 7 Figure 4. Oscar Muñoz installation, “Project for a Memorial”, 2005 In the second video of my project is a large projection which shows the single take –a close-up top view of me handling the original notepad– where page by page, I am erasing every single line of all of what I had written. As is the case with most of Muñoz’ works, we are left here only with a ghost object: An empty physical entity, a memory made relevant precisely because its referent is tinted with the gleam of disappearance. Figure 5. Gallery View B 8 Investigations about the identity of 'Gian' (as he asserted his name was while still atop the tower) all remain inconclusive. In fact, different media refer to him with different names, as even authorities failed to confirm his identity, find or contact family members, or follow through with clarifications about what happened. All this renders him an even more mysterious figure which, given the impactful scale of his suicide, lends the memory of what he did an even larger symbolical potential. Having had what I consider a tragic and privileged view of the city, and at the same time being socially devoid of identity, we became the forgetful audience for whom he paradoxically created one the most powerful images the city, as a collective entity, has ever seen. It was precisely from within this fracture on the surface of all information concerning the event that I found a way for this project to develop.
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