Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Martín Sastre, Self-taught

Born in the British Hospital in Montevideo, on a Friday, February 13, 1976, at 1:00 p.m., under the sign of Aquarius with Gemini rising, Dragon in the Chinese zodiac. He is the oldest of three, and currently lives in Spain.

Cinema came into existence around 1885 and, virtually at the same time, some weird films started being viewed, which were later labeled “experimental cinema.” Deeply linked to literature, more specifically to poetry, we had our Uruguayan examples in Pupila al viento (1949), by Enrico Gras and Danilo Trelles, featuring Rafael Alberti reciting his poem in the soundtrack. Then there was Largo pétalo, by the architect Alberto Mántaras, made in 1958 featuring Pablo Neruda both on and off screen. Cinema remained scarce in Uruguay until the advent of video, in the mid-1980s, and along with it, many changes took place.

That which had been “experimental” became “video art,” and then “art.” Always attached to other arts, as if asking for permission. Some of the work by Hugo Ulibe and Guillermo Casanova gave way to a group of artists, who were closer to the visual arts, including dance, and who founded Nuva - Núcleo Uruguayo de Videoarte, in the second half of the 1970s. Some of the artists who stood out in that group were Fernando Alvarez Cozzi and Enrique Aguerre.

Those young creators freed themselves from the chains of all previous trends, and inaugurated a creative, original body of work, giving rise to a true artistic movement, one that had autonomy and rigueur in the use of audiovisual language.

The offspring of Nuva includes Paula Delgado, Dani Umpi, and Martín Sastre. The latter got started as a child, in the cinema for children courses that Eloy Yerle would organize at the Cinemateca Uruguaya. Later on, he made drawing, sculptures, and attended an architecture school...

In 1999, the Alliance Française in Montevideo asked him to organize an installation for an exhibition in video creation. He got a job working at the gallery in the Alliance, and from there he issued a press release announcing that, due to the death of “Robert Quenedit,” “Jaquelín Quenedit” would arrive in Uruguay as part of a world tour to exorcize the family’s curse. He managed to get some journalists to request interviews with someone that would never arrive, since she had passed away years earlier.

After that media intervention, he obtained a scholarship in France, and upon returning to his country, he thoroughly dedicated himself to audiovisual creation, which led him to make videos in the beginning of the century. In the year 2000 he presented The E! True Hollywood Story and Heidiboy, and at the same time he had an exhibition in New York entitled Big, quisiera ser grande, which attracted attention due to his originality and skill, especially given the fact that he came from a country as ‘grey’ and conservative as Uruguay.

The video is a fake documentary film in which the author is the interviewee, and ends up revealing himself as an artist who rises up from his people’s poverty to reach Hollywood stardom. It is a sort of ironic take on his own story, in which the artist pushes the boundaries, and turns the story into a quasi-comedy.

In the following year, he made Masturbated Virgin I, Masturbated Virgin II, Sor Kitty: The Missionary Nun. Sastre started using the icons of our days, of our beloved consumer society, in this particular case, Britney Spears, who was then living the drama of her virginity. Once again, the artist is featured in the first person, by now already converted into a hero, a sort of apostle, or a domestic Superman capable of saving his heroine. Devoid of sophisticated resources, he runs around the streets holding a giant swab.

Very much influenced by pop, the artist’s visual approach is unscrupulous. Using scant technological supports, he recreates a world of fantasy using data taken from reality. And he confronts us with the other side of that reality, so fickle and cruel that it reminds us of Andy Warhol’s Factory, even though in the case of Sastre, the stars themselves appear on the screen.

Humor is the key for inserting the scalpel into his stories. They manage to obtain immediate complicity from the audience, which becomes part of this world filled with color and visual ideas.

Around that time, the artist arrives in Madrid, through a scholarship granted by Fundación Carolina. There, he made La Trilogía Iberoamericana, comprised of Videoart: The Iberoamerican Legend; Montevideo: The Dark Side of the Pop; and Bolivia 3: Confederation Next. Already converted into Walt Sastre, he entered a time tunnel to create a lesson on video art in the Iberian America, in a sort of epic crusade never before witnessed.

A story of success, in which Hollywood is replaced with the bothersome hyperrealism of the means of communication. In a deeply kitsch taste, characters parade such as Carmen Miranda, Kurt Cobain, George Bush, CNN, Ho Chi Minh, and Martín Sastre himself, turned into a star in the likes of Tom Cruise or Richard Gere in their heyday.

In Latin America, secrets and lies define his story. The most prominent representatives of the European Intelligence Center are sent over to investigate, in Montevideo, the secret of Martín Sastre’s success. The young experts discover a deserted city, and Sastre singing karaoke in the streets. A retrofuturistic story of inverted colonialism, featuring a South American backyard and European financing. The work won the artist Madrid’s ARCO award, at a tender twenty-eight years of age.

Bolivia 3 presents a duel between Martín Sastre, a representative of Iberian-American Art, and Matthew Barney, a member of North American Art. The confrontation is a metaphor for the inequality between opponents, similar to some David and Goliath who will not quit fighting. In Madrid, Sastre hosted a TV show featuring interviews and performance actions, which in turn would take the TV scheme to artistic territories. “I am interested in expanding the limits, working on them, and dissolving them. I do not accept for art to be restricted, while all other things expand,” he says.

And irony takes over our artist. Perhaps from the perspective of the old Europe, he creates what he baptized The Martín Sastre Foundation for the Super Poor Art, exhorting 21st-century Maecenas to adopt Latin American artists, once again portraying himself as the main character in a world that worships characters out of whim, and not for their talent.

Let us suppose that the crisis of values of the 20th century has ended, and the Bible is no longer placed by the heater, as goes the Argentine tango Cambalache. Now, the game is a different one: if you please me, I buy. The Foundation’s Web site is so attractive, so refined, so suggestive, that it barely reveals the intense irony of its contents. It is more seducing than it is commanding, because it has the reason of the brave, of those pure heroes of the 1940s movies.

Sastre then featured in important exhibitions, from the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, with his work Playlist, to the 26th Bienal de São Paulo, in which he represented Uruguay. And then Dublin, New York, Edinburgh, Geneva, Sydney, Genoa, Shanghai got to know a series of works that remain unseen in his native country.

International recognition is always bigger than domestic recognition; this applies to all Uruguayan artists, and it is a rule that does not change with time. The fact is, there is no right or left wing when it comes to the treatment dispensed to art in a “little country” such as ours.

The year 2005 saw the debut of Diana: The Rose Conspiracy, during the Venice Biennale, a fiction work in which he claims to have discovered that Lady Di did not die under the Pont d’Alma in Paris, but that she is alive and hiding in a neighborhood in the outskirts of Montevideo. A secret sisterhood of nuns then decides to rescue Diana of Wales, their most important member.

She does not speak, but is seen carrying shopping bags in the streets of an impoverished neighborhood, and eating churros with a younger boyfriend. Simultaneously, we see archival footage broadcast by international news agencies, upon finding out that the princess did not die. In the words of the author, similar to Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, Diana had to escape her enemies, just like fairy tale princesses hid from villains and would end up in huts lost in the woods…

In that same year, The Martín Sastre Foundation granted a scholarship to Charlotte Seidel, Susi Pietsch, and Annemarie Thiede, three German artists from the Bauhaus School in Weimar, for them to live in Montevideo under the programme Be a Latin American Artist, created by the Foundation.

Martín Sastre’s creativity seems boundless, and his challenge is showing that there is still strength in the Latin American continent, that there are more wills than there are possibilities, even though his character does what he can to get what he wants. And that is how he arrives in England, in 2006, by means of a scholarship granted by the Site Gallery, in Sheffield, to carry out the Freaky Birthday project, inspired by the Hollywood movie Freaky Friday, in which a young woman wants to take over her mother’s body, to understand how the world is viewed from the perspective of another person. And Sastre discovers that he was born on the same day as Robbie Williams. A dream becomes reality as Sastre earns fame and success living inside Robbie’s skin, with the eyes of a Latin American artist.

His relation with the “real world” has many edges. For instance, his work with Spanish electropop group Fangoria (La mano en el fuego), his collaboration with actor Nacho Vidal, and the men’s wear brand EBP, as well as many videos in YouTube, and a long list of et ceteras.

Sastre is not alien to contemporary myths. From Britney Spears to Paris Hilton, those myths comprise a discourse that allows him to ironize this world in which we are supposed to live. Globalization is always a feature in his work, from the objects in his drawings to fragments of films, documentaries, fiction, or animation. His work creates a postindustrial world where nothing signifies what it really is, if not inserted into a context. Dreams come true easily, as do fame, the possibility of becoming a star, or the possibility of becoming a Latin American artist, that is, poor. Pop, in his work, is a way of seeing the world, of going beyond appearances, of composing a space-time that is close to fantasy, this fantasy that invades us coming from screens all the time, distinct from the reality of newscasts.

“Uruguay is a small territory that does not have much of a deep-rooted culture of its own. It is a crossing place between Latin America as a geographic location, the contribution of the majoritarian European immigration, and the strong invasion of United States culture,” as Sastre put it.

It is not by chance that Sastre lives in Almodóvar’s home country. It is not by chance either that his source of inspiration is still the South, Montevideo, his homeland, which kicks him out, yet supplies him with so many themes to enact. Perhaps this boy who learned to decode images from Eloy Yerle is seeking a myth in which to believe, after realizing that fame is a mere fairy tale, having fun as a protagonist, a hero in a human comedy that is built up day by day, as he proceeds in his quest.

The fact is that we, Uruguayans, are so serious that we need room to take off the mask of transcendence, and start appreciating the humor of Sastre, he who fights against the empire, who bares the secrets of myths (living and dead), modest with pride, who sings and dances like the great artists, and who brings us closer to a universe in which everything is possible. And if there is no money, he will do it anyway, because Sastre is a genius.

“The devastating recording of reality by news networks (where the reality perceived is at the same time detached, ‘produced,’ and occasionally generated by the means of communication) is merely the first sign of a cataclysm of huge proportions that discloses the advancement of the real into fantasy. And terror and chaos came with the advent of the Bush era, when wars broadcast live on our TV screens and the ubiquity of surveillance cameras have produced effects of reality so powerful that they ruined Hollywood, the great factory of dreams,” says the artist.

We all are Gardel, we all are Martín Sastre!

Thank you, Martín.

A curator and a filmmaker, Ricardo Casas (Montevideo, 1955) established, in Uruguay, the Divercine - International Film Festival for Children and Youth, and the Iman – Instituto de Medios Audiovisuales para Niños y Jóvenes, and wrote, along with Graciela Dacosta, the book Diez Años de Video Uruguayo, 1995. His Palabras Verdaderas, 2004, about Mario Benedetti, was awarded best Latin American documentary film at the Lleida Festival (Spain). In 2000, he assumed the vice-presidency at ASOPROD – the Uruguayan Association of Cinema and Video Makers and Producers, which reelected him in 2005. He is a member of the Commission of Directors at the Cinemateca Uruguaya.