Category: VIDEO SCULPTURE

Dimensions: Variable

Year: 2004

Awarded Place of Honour, “Inquieta imagen III” Videoart Contest,
San José, Costa Rica, 2004

The assembly is a showcase that contains two televisions whose covers have been removed. We see only screen and circuits. What appears on the two screens are complementary sequences that look like the same but are actually a bipolar dialogue, where they sometimes coincide and sometimes contradict each other. This structure helps me to represent the flows of desire, its bifurcations and confluences.

The character who appears on the screens is Jimmy. A dwarf who was chosen precisely because of his condition of being a person who is not average. In the video’s story, Jimmy comes out of the window and finds himself in an illusory space. But we viewers still see him through the glass of a shop window.

Sometimes we perceive certain groups of people, who are outside the average, as if they were inside a shop window. We tend to dehumanize them because we do not know much about their lives. Many of us do not know what it feels like to live in a world that is made according to other measures and standards different from ours. Being part of the norm, of the average, deprives us of seeing other realities. In this work I reflect about the dialectic relationship between illusion and reality as well as the mental constructs that mediate our perception of people outside the average.