Deadline
The end of the world in time and form - Luis Orozco*
April is, generally, one of the sunniest and quietest months in México City, there is enough wind blowing to help clear away the usual contamination of the air. This allows the contemplation of the mountains and volcanos that surround the city. Alongside the absence of rain, April is the perfect time to host outdoor events. But April of 2009 became, for many days, the perfect scenario to represent the end of the world.
Quiet, luminous and desolating, one imagines the end to be different, the immediate reference can only be taken from the movies, that allude to aliens or prophecies, all of which has structured the unconscious of the Western collective as a sort of prelude to the end of the world.
In a few days, the menace of a pandemic transformed the city into a desert, from the moment the government “suggested” the closing down of schools and offices to prevent the spreading of the disease, the people that circulated the streets used masks given out by soldiers. The images were, of course, like those in the movies. The megapolis in pause, its rhythm completely disrupted and, as a soundtrack, the recommendations and preventive hygienic routines, being recited over and over in every possible media. For a couple of weeks, we were the people with the cleanest hands.
In these two weeks, México was pointed out as a nest of infection and as the source of a new lethal, contagious and unnameable disease.
It seems natural to see our tranquility disappear when we are faced with something of which we don’t know much, our first system of authority in the world consists of the ability to name things, and that is how it worked; when the scandalous speculations about the origin of the swine flu derived in measures to control it, these included a new vocabulary that for some reason, calmed us all a little bit.
I remember a similar feeling when I witnessed on tv, along with millions of people around the world, the most broadcasted terrorist attack in history. Another perfect scenario for the end of the world, widely exploited by the movie industry: New York City. If the world was to come to an end, it had to begin there, or at least, that is the image that has been inscribed in our minds.
At that moment, in México in April, I had the strange feeling that I could effectively be witnessing what might be the beginning of the end.
At that time also, the source of evil was left to be identified and named, in order to be controlled.
Campo de Fuerzas (Field of Forces) by Pedro Gómez-Egaña was produced in that context, at the Torre de los vientos (Tower of the Winds), a functional sculpture by the Uruguayan artist Gonzalo Fonseca, part of the Ruta de la Amistad (route of friendship), in the southern part of México City. This space is used for interventions, which are generally one-day events, due in part to the limited access to the place. The sculpture is placed on a triangular terrain on the side of the most important highway of the city. Pedro’s work was part of a series of interventions that were programmed on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the route. It was with this principle that Pedro began the process that would lead to the realisation of the Campo de Fuerzas performance.
The preparations for the performance developed through long-distance communications, and Pedro did not even know the space or had even the city before.
One of the things that interested me the most was the way in which he composed the work, in the broadest sense of the word, bringing the elements that he uses as a composer to a sculptural ground. It is important to note that Pedro combines his music and visual art experience since his beginnings as a visual artist.
As an artist and a curator I consider that the piece was structured from all the elements that made it possible, from the initial communications, the trips around the city looking for materials and the fact that the Tower of the Winds was always the axis.
Pedro composed a piece that turned the tower into a target, hit in its centre by a rocket that was to slowly disappear in its interior.
Curiously, the tower could formally be what Pedro laid out in his piece and then become the destiny of an inoffensive bullet that seemed to calm down the big city, sick of fear and paranoia.
The series of associations that can me made around the piece is very curious, I am convinced that a live action like Campo de Fuerzas, as I mentioned before, integrates in its structure everything that surrounds it, in the real time of its execution as in its context, which for Pedro and myself, was and still is, determinant.
I cannot help associating the surrounding landscape of the tower: a ground of endemic vegetation that grows on volcanic rock, the result of a series of eruptions of the Xitle. And a significant fact that occurred 40 years ago: the landing of a man on the Moon. The tower of the winds seemed in this context like a primitive observatory, amidst a Moon landscape, similar to the images that were working material for many artists such as Smithson, Long or Heizer, who, decades before, proposed connections between controlled accidents and neolithic monuments.
The 60s were, among other things, a decade when the modern men made amends with the “primitive” men, through anthropology and art. The concept of “progress” went on to be part of a cyclic scheme, represented by many artists who worked with landscape. They went from minimal modifications done on video and photography up to undertaking of big ephemeral projects. These pretended to represent little analysed prehistorical monuments, which, for that same condition, had kept up to that moment, a significant charge of mystery, capitalised by these artists as an added value to their own works.
We live, nowadays, in a different stage of the cycle, where we again value the remains and documents of a recent past, where nostalgia and ruins become the new monuments. Time goes by faster and the revisionist urge doesn’t go too far in the timeline. Our end of the world connects with an immediately previous one, a big part of the current art production is still somehow affected by a global consciousness that awoke with the bombs of 45 in Japan, memories now sold as souvenirs, like the Berlin wall fragments at their moment. Stones now speak a different language, the mystery of the primitive monoliths is being substituted by disaster simulations, by debris.
Having recuperated the immediate context as well as the possible historical records of the space, I will now centre in what Campo de Fuerzas was for myself and in Pedro’s process in México, in general.
Time is, undoubtedly, the most important element in Pedro’s work, real and linear time; the immediate context of the action and the place opened a very interesting dialogue.
During the stage of long-distance communication, I received a series of drawings that illustrated very clearly the development of the action and the elements involved in it: a paper rocket, a tree and a thread. The play of the elements and its dimensions reminded me of children’s tales, as these are always structured in a very clear, schematic, illustrative and attractive way, easily memorable.
That was the initial approach and that is how the action unfolded.
Somehow the idea of Pedro’s own trip, the way in which that rocket would arrive to its final destination, the backing soundtrack (Liszt’s Vía Crusis, played backwards) and the transformation of the elements, (produced by its dimension and perception of them) also implied relating the macro and the micro.
We assumed that the world is small, because we had gotten there from different places, because our plans were becoming real and because the rocket was there, 100 meters away from the tower, laid on the terrain where it would be dragged by a red thread, which, because of the time when the action happened, would be invisible. The disappearance of the motor that moved the rocket (Pedro himself) and the thread, gave the piece a life of its own, so it would move, slowly and distressingly, towards the tower, its final destination and place of transformation.
Campo de Fuerzas was in a way similar to the game we all play when we have a map of the world at hand and we spin it, to point a random spot in it with our finger and then imagine a trip to that (known or unknown) place.
The same day of the action, the sanitary siege of the city began. Many public events, concerts, cinema and other shows were cancelled. We were “brave” to continue in spite of the recommendations to drop everything and leave. As the hours passed by, the sound of the cars around us went from intense to
non-existent, the sky darkened, rain started falling and a strong wind blew.
Given the strange context, all this seemed like a sign to continue or to otherwise, abandon. Nonetheless, minutes before starting the last trip to the tower, the rain stopped falling and the wind stopped blowing. With a few people as an audience and a spotlight, the rocket began its slow journey, accompanied by the music that emanated from the interior of the tower. Barely moving, this paper arrow disappeared in the shadow that was drawn by the tower. More than agony, that action represented hope, everything that happened around it transformed that simple and extravagant action into a path of thought through the rocky terrain and the evidently absurd reality of the context.
To come to the end of the piece, we had to believe in the disappearing of the ship, in its return or its take-off at the inside of a lit white space. This space was still filled with music and with the image of a miniature tree, that was connected by one of its branches with a red thread to a miniature replica of the suspended ship in a corner, firmly held by the action of a magnetic force field.
We could imagine that a process that was apparently so connected to that specific context, couldn’t be duplicated. One of the characteristics of Pedro’s actions would be this refusal to repeat. Nonetheless, as we begin again the game with the spinning map of the world, we come up in a new process, in a different place but with a similar principle to Campo de Fuerzas. The physical tension of the elements and the symbolic tension of the displays can be reconstructed. The principle of nostalgia and ruin is a motor that is reloaded when relocated, it generates things all over again, with the simple rules that apply when someone stands in front of a random wall in a new city and questions him/herself about the history of it. The piece feeds itself from this constant interrogation, from the traveling of the artist, his doubts and the same road proposing solutions. The questions exposed by such a piece bring hope because in the end, the reflection implies a recognition of oneself in the other. As persons and as artists, by producing an art that belongs to its immediate space and time, we become reviewers of a world that forgets easily.
We, the few witness of Campo de Fuerzas, were able to sense for some minutes that the end of the world could simply imply a new beginning.
Luis A. Orozco
México City, october of 2009.
Translated from Spanish by: Natalia Valencia
* Luis is the curator of "Rutas y Máquinas" and MUCA Roma, Mexico City