Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Daniel Umpiérrez is a son of the same land that gave Carlos Gardel to the world—as Uruguayan historians swear. Nevertheless, the world’s most renowned Tango singer’s fame was not enough to release Tacuarembó from the condition of being just one of many farming sites in the country.

Closer to Brazil than to Río de la Plata, 390 kilometers away from the capital Montevideo, life in Tacuarembó goes on without any major disturbances, under a very hot weather. Not much differently from nowadays, daily life in the 1970s was full of folkloric parties, traditional celebrations, meetings at the parish, at the square, around the bandstand, in the park, at friends’ homes.

For eighteen years, these typical country distractions have provided the framework for the microcosm of Daniel Umpiérrez, as his imagery was supplied by the chaotic cauldron offered by television, a window that connected him to a world discordant with all that he saw around himself. Imported TV series, Brazilian soap operas, Iggy Pop, and Elke Maravilha shined in that box of light and sound to which the boy paid much attention.

Adulthood marked his arrival in Montevideo. Decided to become an artist, he did not take long to find that he was more comfortable with his inner universe than with the appeals and possibilities that the capital offered him. He tried the conventional approach: to produce within the expectations of the visual arts in his country, to create a cohesive, coherent, consequential “oeuvre.” His uneasiness would not go away. He had the “feeling that no one was interested” in his stuff, as he says in an interview for this Dossier.

An experiment-joke-catharsis of sorts came to rescue him from vocational apathy. In 2001, intending to make fun of the marketing strategies of the recording industry, the artist created the label Dani Umpi Records, under which he recorded a parody, in English language, of a classic album of the Uruguayan songbook (something like versions of Caetano Veloso standards using Internet-based automatic translation software), and an album of dancing, sampled versions of contemporary hymns of his country.

Destined for restricted museum and gallery halls, the CDs ended up escaping the art circuit, and received airplay on FM radios in Montevideo. Thus was born Dani Umpi, singer, performer, and whatever else comes up.

Free from the straitjacket in which he felt confined, he set free the many heteronyms that he always lived with and—upon bringing together all of his personas—he elects as a leitmotiv the small, trivial human tragedies and miracles, liquidized by daily life. Territories usually distant from the art world, such as beauty parlors or baby soccer courts, became the arenas where he promoted his first concerts, currently attended by punks, underground people, rockers, upper-middle-class kids, and middle-aged ladies.

Along with Dani Umpi, also born were the novels Miss Tacuarembó, Aún soltera, and Sólo te quiero como amigo, flashes of everyday banality filtered through a humor as acid as it is omnipresent.

“I am increasingly outside art as an institution, and at the same time I am increasingly inside it, because now that I do not maintain a steady rhythm of exhibitions and performances, people have started to become interested in my work and my old pieces, they are analyzing what I did and buying my work. This made me realize that in fact I have always discussed the same things, I have always been very coherent and much too monothematic, too naïve. I basically discuss boyfriends, breakups, and dates using a discourse and a perspective that are childish, adolescent, as if life were a sitcom where all that exists are affections and their ridiculous conflicts,” he claims.

Nevertheless, the reality that emerges from his writings is seldom a sweetened one, in which alienation or desperation are less choices than they are conditions to which the characters are doomed. Like a neighbor lady who stands by the window every afternoon to watch other people’s lives, the habit may seem serene, touching, and harmlessly decadent, but the fruits collected from that activity may come loaded, beyond familiarity, with disturbance, surprise, and repulsion.

InMiss Tacuarembó, the character Natalia goes out dancing, does drugs, and, minutes before entering a bad trip, she jots down: “I am still jumping, but something bothers me; I look down and realize that I lost one sandal. I try to find it around the dance floor, but it is impossible with all these people gathering together. Suddenly, I see it between the legs of some girls who think that they are Björk in her first album, dancing around like stupid dolls, making childish faces, and caressing the ridiculous rolls in their heads, seemingly tired of carrying the empty transparent backpack on their backs. I throw myself down at the floor. It is a bed, a pool, a couch like those in expensive hair salons.” 

The main inspiration, says Umpi, comes from conversations with friends: “I often copy directly what they say and do, I put it textually into a song or something else. I am very much interested in that discourse, its commonplaces, its hallucinations.” 

Beyond the fictional exercise, like a schizophrenic Fernando Pessoa, the artist not only multiplied his creations, he came to make his creations real, as they took over artistic productions, curatorships, demonstrations. Among them is Nelson Nilson, a politically correct architecture student, depressed over the fact that his girlfriend left him. As the young man, the artist participated in street protests, drew “quite psychotic” models, and attended courses in the School of Architecture at Universidad de la República, where he even taught a class.

Passion also defined the personality of Willy Will. “Will was a very good-looking adolescent, who was in love with me, and who wrote me love letters,” Umpi explains. In order to provide the story with life, the artist would send inflamed messages to himself: he would send them by mail to the studio of which he was a member. “A delirium.”

Finally, the most complex and active creature was Adriana Broadway, architect and curator. “I would write for magazines, curate exhibitions in the Montevideo scene, I would charge for works as if I were Adriana. I did things that I loved doing, such as commenting the Bienal de São Paulo for a magazine without having attended the exhibition. In this case, I did not approach love life, it was more... conceptual. I would discuss art, the market, the local critics, the various agents, and things that I am less and less interested in reviewing and criticizing.” 

Nowadays, well known enough not to be able to go unnoticed anymore at events or public meetings in his country, Umpiérrez has left his alter egos aside to feed the only one that allows him to be himself (and something more) without having to change his attire, appearance, or humor. This makes it increasingly difficult to dissociate author and character, a position that pleases the artist. “The only one still living is Dani Umpi. I continue to live in him. I no longer work with the fake, except for when it is based on myself.”