Instalación (proyección de video, sonido, elementos de fiesta, cortina de velo)
Tras una primera Variación sobre Los santos inocentes, realizada para la PQ11 en el Palacio de Cristal de Praga, MAPA es invitado por la curadora Joanna Warza a imaginar una nueva variación de este proyecto, estrenado inicialmente bajo la forma de montaje escénico, para un lugar específico de la ciudad de Gotemburgo, en el marco de la Bienal Internacional de Arte contemporáneo de 2013.
La imagen de la escena final de la versión escénica de Los santos inocentes es proyectada e instalada en un antiguo granero del puerto de Gotemburgo: en el interior de este lugar mítico (Lilla Bommen: el Muelle de los sueños rotos), al poner su cuerpo allí dentro, el visitante descubre, en los múltiples vestigios de una fiesta, imágenes-fantasma de una alucinante “escena del crimen”.
“The exceptionally popular Swedish-Danish TV crime series The Bridge starts with the image of a blackout: the lights go off in the whole city, bringing life to a halt. This is the moment in which a “truth terrorist” begins a series of murders, aiming to draw attention to various neglected social agendas. In the past half-century, Nordic crime and horror fiction has appeared as a kind of sublimated and staged political debate in the region, a post-Marxist critique of a society hiding its vice behind an apparent harmony. Fascination with crime fiction—as the genre fan Bertolt Brecht wrote—derives from a deeply modernist project, since it represents life as logical and coherent, where every wrong must have a reason and evil eventually fails, aspiring to the phantasm of a pure society.
The exhibition is set in downtown Göteborg, leading from the Lilla Bommen pier to the city backwaters along the so-called “Quay of Broken Dreams” (Drömmarnas kaj). Its main focus is the artists’ interest in crime at large, in its performative and narrative aspects, as well as its legal and political status. It explores the roles of artists as detectives, researchers, story-tellers, but also as social advocates and activists, investigating the sphere of the illegal, the grey zones and the loopholes of the law, and the resulting potential political or activist uses. Bringing to the fore criminal transgressions and issues of public legislation—through the history of shipwrecks, the implications of forensic architecture, the witness materials of a policeman who became an artist, the social noir and the political—the show echoes the famous Adorno quote: “Every work of art is an uncommitted crime,” since art, as much as crime, wants to eradicate the status quo.”
Joanna Warza
Göteborg, Suecia
