A set is mostly a produced space, where circumstances of representation are designed and controlled. It is staged for cameras to capture something: an anchor exaggerating breaking news, a comedian whose jokes fall flat, a politician in a debate against himself. An exhibition is not entirely different; it happens in a manufactured space, with specific conditions and designs that allow a precise narrative. It is where specific agents, along with artworks and discourses, are deployed around the museographer’s device. Therefore, this set is an exercise in translations, where both the rules of art exhibitions and the tricks of the TV studio are at play, oscillating from one to the other. Thus, the artworks, acting as characters, become visible inside both scenarios staged in the exhibition room.
Generally speaking, the spaces, images and objects are located in a field of ambiguity that aims to open all possible readings, despite the viewer`s perspective. \
As an observer you are central to the set—as long as you play your part inhabiting it, the circuit is possible. Where the truth or fiction begins is entirely up to visual tradition. Somewhere between the veracity, legitimacy, or the appearance of truth lies a distinctive place to look and question the shapes, powers, and needs available to produce and consume the past.
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SET is an installation that brings together the logic of the museographic device and the nature of theatric props, hosting within a spatial fiction works articulated around an illusory museum space, a shallow architecture inspired by the Metropolitan museum`s interior decors. The stage houses 17 oil paintings of photorealistic appearance, and a single channel video. The images are painted versions of still photos from Caracol TV`s shooting of «Escobar, El Patron del Mal» the Colombian precedent biopic to Netflix’s Narcos. These pictures depict iconic scenes, based on real events from the 80`s and 90`s war between the drug cartels and the Colombian state—situations and characters that, due to their relevance, were carefully staged by the studio and, hence, reconstructed inside this artificial set with the additional element of painting as a medium of a traceable historical significance These pictures are versions of other versions, translations coming from an alleged source, a TV series produced to refresh the look of specific historical anecdotes, remembrances that lack sufficient visual referents despite being an essential element of Colombia`s visual culture.
The video ADVERTENCIA / WARNING, which accompanies the paintings, also takes a fragment from the TV series. A five seconds disclaimer aired at the end of every chapter, in which the producers explicitly state the liberties taken regarding the “real events. The video loops around a still image of a TV set, on which the warning paragraph continuously blurs and focuses, making it almost impossible to understand in a single read as the text clears for short fragments of time before losing its shape again. The installation comments on national museums as well. Taking the Met or the Louvre as examples, it fakes the scale of the walls, the craftsmanship of the moldings, the color, light, and elegance, to parody a devised space of historical legitimacy. A place where the relationship with imagery reminds the audience of a time when painting had everything to do with the monopoly of historical representation. An age in which authors or patrons had the right to hold historical accuracy unchallenged.