Hello!
The work is the product of the last year work and research, dealing with
issues that are very close to our hearts. It brings together and expands
our interest in pre-cinematic narratives. We hope you like it.
Very best
Rosario & Roberto
EL ULTIMO GRITO: HORIZONS DEFERRED @ HALLE
VERRIERE MEISENTHAL 2 JULY/4 SEP 2016
El Ultimo Grito’s Horizons Deferred at
Halle Verriere, Meiseinthal, is the summation of ideas and work developed
around the subject of glitch as social displacement. The show
represents their multi-faceted practice, with large scale interactive sculpture
and installation works showcasing their distinctive social and political
engagement and wit.
Horizons Deferred consists of four large-scale works: “The Architectures”, "The Users", "Dialogues" and
"Soundscape". These form a city of inflatable sculptures fitted with
motion and sound sensors reacting to each other and the visiting public. A ‘controlled demolition implosion’ is
triggered, the city falls and is recreated anew - subject to individual
interactions.
Horizons Deferred plays with Delueze & Guattari’s notion of “plateau”, encouraging participants to
construct a physical artistic representation of their own point of view: the
plateau from which we simultaneously view our future and our past.
The horizon is that line between your
current reality and your constructed perspective fuelled by your expectations
and dreams. By interacting with sensors in the sculptures, the users can start
to take control of the system they are in, which is a micro-representation of
larger systems.
“The Architectures” are extra-large-scale inflatable sculptures fitted with motion and
sound sensors reacting to each other and to the visitor. The works
develop El Ultimo Grito’s exploration of the idea of ‘glitch’ - the technological malfunctions in
a system that reveal the workings underpinning how that system behaves. By
being given a glimpse of these secret mechanisms, we as users can learn to
manipulate them and in the microcosm harness some control over our lives.
“The Dialogues” invoke paradoxes to disturb our rational processes and question our
decision-making, inviting us to ask if where we are going is really where we
want to go. “Capitalism is boring" says one machine
- "I am loving it" answers the other.
“The Users”
are hand-painted people at large scale, whose tattoos tell real stories (as
tattoos used to do). These represent the tension between what you have been and
what you are, the plateau before the horizon, the final moment of doubt before
the revelation of where the consequences of our actions will lead us: whether
toward Utopia or Dystopia.
Delueze & Guattari’s notion of “plateau” is brought into sharp contemporary
relevance with El Ultimo Grito’s exploration of the
idea of the migrant. The idea of the horizon is revealed in the imagery
generated from media representations of contemporary realities. For the people
stranded on a makeshift boat the Greek coast is that line that represents the
continuation of life. As it is, they are prevented from reaching their
destination, they are stranded in that plateau - call it sea, "the
jungle", a refugee camp, Ellis Island. Each plateau exists in a ‘stand-by’ state, just before it can
materialise and become that new reality in which the migrant can finally
immerse.
Meanwhile, that very horizon is changing.
The architectural redevelopment of metropolises like London configure them as
non-places to be bought up rather than lived in: quickly built and sold out
even faster to phantom owners. Social housing is being demolished driven by the
pretend horizons of capital. From our existing plateau, consumerism and
speculation drive the appearance of Dark Cities of glass, the empty shells of
neoliberalism.
Thus in Horizons Deferred the
representations of these architectures are structures inflated by air and
deflated by a vacuum. Industrial and housing estates are disappearing under
controlled demolitions and remodeled as luxury apartments with barista cafes, a
city of conspicuous consumption where there seems to be no space for any other
model of city life. As in the movie Dark City, urban
reconfigurations require a reassignment of every citizen’s role, no longer as individual
members of a community but as individual transactors in an economy. As in
Ballard’s High Rise, this gives rise to
atomisation and the narrowing of the experience of life. Horizons
Deferred engages with these themes in a continuing attempt to suggest
ways of recovering our agency as individuals in totalising systems.
El Ultimo Grito are based in London and
cherished around the world for their colorful public sculptures created with
non-standard materials that engagingly address urban financial and social
displacement. As part of their practice, the duo analyse and manipulate the
signs that describe and construct our reality. In their collisions of film,
text, sound, graphics and constructions they offer up new forms and directions.
In our encounters with their work we are provoked and empowered to explore how
we can take control of our social and physical realities.
