Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Ten years ago, Marcello Mercado left his native Argentina and the personal and artistic concerns that his home country aroused in him to take a dive into what he describes as “the control of machines.” Starting with the PC, he later evolves into an arsenal of tools that provide support to the complexity and experimental boldness of an oeuvre marked by connections between art and science, painting and genetics, performance and technology. 

Born in the Chaco region, the artist became acquainted early on in his life with the confluences between life, death, science, and technology. His father, a physician, would take him along in his rounds to hospitals. “I have witnessed extreme situations. I have smelled them as well.” His mother, on the other hand, who was a biochemist, taught the boy to perceive the most trivial phenomena from the organic point of view, action-reaction: “If my legs would hurt after I had been running, she would say: ‘You have accumulated lactic acid.’” 

Homemade chemical experiments, coupled with knowledge of human pain and misery along the corridors of the institutions that reflected the always-troubled Latin American public health system, resulted in a “biochemical theater.” “That is what I do nowadays. If we add up the transistor radio I used to listen to all day long, I have built a world, in between 540 and sixteen hundred kilocycles, that exists to this day.” 

His early works, made in the 1980s, approach subjects such as corruption, red tape, ethical shortcomings in Argentine politics, religiosity, sex, and death. Examples include videos such as The Torment Zone (1992) and, later on, The Warm Place (1998), in which excerpts from the Bible are combined with images of surgeons and patients inside the operating room. Political activism, mass culture elements, critique of inefficient economic systems, and chicken slaughter scenes all fit under the peculiar umbrella of associations that Mercado proposes. 

Performance was soon to be introduced into his work. In the beginning, he would rewrite text he would hear in the scientific TV shows that he would watch. Then, he developed a series in which he would read to animals and to corpses, often during surgical procedures. The performance in which he reads writings by Karl Marx as he pays a visit to an amusement park gave birth to the video Das Kapital (2004). The piece, to which another eighty minutes have just been added, features a rereading by Mercado of the German thinker’s oeuvre, from a biological and digital perspective. 

Germany marked a watershed in the artist’s career. Invited to work at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, in 1998, he was faced with an apparatus that hugely expanded his set of tools, so far comprised of a PC. “I underwent a huge cultural change there, my production system changed. Technology allowed me to do what I wanted and much more.” 

In his quest to find a way around “the overwhelming distress of learning to operate all of those machines,” he devised his own learning process. Using drawings and notes, the artist unravelled the range of possibilities that computers opened up. In the process, he left behind the woes of his homeland, and moved forward in his exploration of the research elements he feels at ease with since his childhood, namely mathematical and biochemical principles. 

He couples those with elements from the realm that comprises his ambitions nowadays: challenges posed by technology, alternate views of political-economic theories, and investigations featuring organic materials submitted to electronic and digital interventions. This phase is reflected in works such as Das Kapital and The Chemical and Physical Perception in the Eye of the Cat, in the Moment of the Cut, which is based on pain transmission mechanisms, and was awarded at the 16th Videobrasil (2007). 

More recently, the artist has been exploring an avenue of expression that he describes as experimental painting. It consists of laboratory work involving DNA, and may also combine his bioart experiments with traditional painting. The most recent ones include Cabeza (2006), which can be viewed here. 

Presently, the artist is reissuing twenty-five of his early videos and preparing, for 2009, an installation involving elements from previous works. For next year, he is also developing a “bioart-performance” project to be carried out in a “high-technology laboratory.” 

The future belongs to microbes. Based on the statement that the world is “evolving into an ecosystem” dominated by those organisms, an assertion that is usually included in his writings, Mercado explains himself: “The virulence of microbes combined with the virulence of our ignorance is a possible future. We are thousands of years, and microbes are a form of eternity. In other words, deep down, I am an optimistic.”