Associação Cultural Videobrasil

IT’S TODAY OR TOMORROW IN THIS CITY

Each installation or video projection of a work by Sebastian Diaz Morales (Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina, 1975) brings up a recurring doubt, which stems from a recurring question: whether what we are watching is a documental research, a biographic narrative with fantastic overtones, fictional journalism, or an ode to the landscape (natural and urban, as it plays its spontaneous role as main character in a road movie of the inner self). Watching the construction of his thoughts on cinema leads us to realize what lies ahead of the space and time contained in the artist’s videos and films: the perfecting of a powerful visual imagination (either with sound or silent). The atmosphere of the movement in the footage he captures and edits may resemble that of a somber psychological thriller, the lightness of a pleasant travel diary, or else an intense field trip based on a real-life, third-party geo-sociopolitical context. He comments on the past or the future as a clear extension of the present, devoid of cold interpretative analyses, but displaced into a distant world. 

Reviewing his body of work means perceiving genuine structural filmic changes, which are experienced beyond what we assume to be merely semidocumental raw material. It is like receiving the very confirmation of the manifold and unsuspected qualities of an essay or even a successful literary adaptation. Movement, in his work, is generated by the desire to unravel and reenact situations which stem from an invisible world. 

Resampled 

The day-to-day life and the chaotic traffic of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, provide the backdrop for 15,000,000 Parachutes (2001). Sequences of images of the national monument illustrate the collective drama of the megalopolis by the Indian Ocean, with its sky-high unemployment rates. Amidst urban shots in a sea of antennae, reflections of the overpasses on the mirrored façades, and litter, parachutists’ doubles jump from skyscrapers under construction, and empty buildings provide a touching metaphor for those whose struggle for survival must start over each and every day, again and again. According to Diaz Morales, “then it’s the illusion the second motor of things.” 

“Casas, mais casas, rostos diferentes e corações iguais” (Houses, more houses, different faces and equal hearts) 

The Apocalyptic Man (2002) is based upon Los Siete Locos (Ed. Rosso, Buenos Aires, 1929), by Roberto Arlt—a work which is key to understanding how and when the implementation of the frantic mechanical timing, typical of newsrooms, began to strongly influence literary creation around the world. In it, signs found by the artist during an obscure inner trip materialize enigmatically, one by one, during a procession on the Day of the Dead, in a province in Central Mexico. At the peak of tension, the main character disappears, and there appears his doppelganger, which originates from the encounter of the religious parade and the holy madness of this small city. “Undoubtedly, in life, faces have little meaning,” says Arlt in Los Siete Locos. Excerpts from the book appear throughout the projection, and together with the slowly moving image and the mysterious audio they set the pace for that cult of death attended by everyone. The heavy breathing of gamblers at a cockfight translates the power of catharsis. A backpacker’s desperate flight from reality as he runs from his own conscience, his enemy, as a sound effect appears to set a time bomb beating nonstop within the city’s subterranean heart. There lies the essence of that which terrifies readers in Los Siete Locos: the “come to being” through a crime. By conversing with Arlt’s work, Morales repositions the construction of the writer’s thinking in the present time, and outlines his own work in accordance with the crossroads that takes place through times. 

The time and place of the barbarian with the slingshot 

The white, pale, faint, quasi-shapeless contour defines the grayish backdrop of raw reality. Media cameras and impressive footage culled from international newscasts. Power and its weapons. The first scenes in Lucharemos hasta anular la ley (2005) are dizzyingly dense from the get-go; there appears the silhouette of a robed priest as he crosses the popular battlefield in front of the federal government’s parliamentary headquarters in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A man riding a bicycle passes unscathed through the rain of stones and curses against the state-owned building. The darkness of a Middle-Ages-like atmosphere set in a public square, smack-dab in the political and nervous center of Argentinean life, on a day of civilian protest. Far from championing any idealistic notion whatsoever, taking a critical stance towards media-based visual culture which surrounds us from all sides, Lucharemos hasta anular la ley reworks famous images associated with the major, unchecked economic and social crisis which marked the country in the beginning of the decade. Upon contrasting such obviously immortalized footage, Morales artistically agitates the community against the violence of the dirty policy of State Law against the citizen and citizenship.