GOODBYE HORIZON
Curator: LIBERIA
EL CONTRAESPECTÁCULO DE LAS COSAS DEJANDO DE EXISTIR - Installation.
Por: Geraldiny Guerrero
June–July 2017
Photography Santiago Pinyol
Horizon is defined as the line that apparently separates the sky from the earth, an horizon line also separates the deep mysteries behind the origin of things, of the moral, and of the world of the immediate reality that is so familiar to us, an horizon line is also the fundamental grammatical tool for the construction of landscapes which is defined at the same time as the point of view of an area of land considered a spectacle. It only takes some zapping through channels to get familiar with the content of Adiós Horizonte.
Recently in a drunk discussion a dear friend said it didn’t matter who won the US elections nothing was going to happen, a friend argued the contrary by saying that Trump was a madman and that he would have access to weapon of mass destruction which he could detonate at any time. I thought both scenarios were rather gloomy, either a static political world where there is no significant structural change, or a collective death that opposed to the end of the age of the dinosaurs it wouldn’t leave oil, fossils, or vestiges of a species that barely blinked in the history of the globe.
Maybe it’s in fiction where we like to see higher chances, either through ID (Investigation Discovery), where they often tell the story of a random person, who could be our sister, or at least someone’s sister, or our girlfriend, or maybe the neighbor’s wife. From the beginning we know this story ends in his death, but not in a simple death, in a violent death, a weird one, at the hands of some bloodthirsty guy who embodies the evilness, an unreal death, while the TV show guarantees that it’s a real death from a real story. Despite the fact that the main character’s death lets on failures of the system, at the end there’s justice, the victimizer was found and we feel relieved and confident that there are guarantees of justice.
Almost as a part of the collective universal imagination, in a way a new paradigm, cost us very little work to imagine deserted scenarios in which a nuclear bomb devastates humanity, or in which a meteorite falls on the earth, putting an end to every living thing, and triggers one big collective death. Over the years we have learned that the trajectory to the end will be slow, that our protagonists will have to face a hostile reality where they will have to be spectators of dreary landscapes, fire, catastrophes, cannibalism, and an horizon that blurs, in other words, and spectacle where there will be no border. As long as there’s nothing more laborious that knowing or imagining that our deaths will probably be boring, ordinary, and lonely, while other people’s lives who maybe work in a coal mine will be years of agony because of an EPOC in which they will daily see the slow devastation of a landscape that was once green, or that the death of many black men in US will be with a bladed weapon in some street at the hands of a white male who hates difference, who won’t go to jail, and who idolizes Trump because of an underlying problem known as poverty and disinformation.
For outstanding and absurd that is Science Fiction, it has more space in our imaginary than the end an oppressive economic system, than class antagonisms, than the fact that things happen every day, that maybe they don’t happen to us in our immediate reality, but they do to someone, to someone less privileged who lives in some place that is so far from us.
Whether through and installation (Lujo moderno, Gabriel Mejía) using materials somewhat tacky (mañé) that we are familiar with, and that through layers of transparency seeks to achieve darkness and build a landscape; or a quote from a science fiction book (The road, Cormac Mccarthy) carved on coal from a local mine referred to (El contra-espectáculo de las cosas dejando de existir, Geraldiny Guerrero) Adiós Horizonte give us a glimpse into the little glitch in our preconceived notion of the world, that honest mistake in which our eyes becomes kind of noisy. Whilst we are afraid of the end, we cannot stop picturing it together, and picturing it as a big spectacle provided by the earth. The work of Geraldiny Guerrero and Gabriel Mejía may not have much in common at first sight, beyond the non-permanent materials, the sharp humor, the staging: there is a common gesture, the idea of a very thin horizon line which separates the immediate reality from a collective contemporary cosmogony.
Manuela Besada Lombana
