VISITANTS
Galería Elba Benítez is pleased to present Visitants, an exhibition of new work by El Ultimo Grito.
Visitants consists of works in various media —film, video, objects and installations— that, while fully autonomous as individual art works, as a group are intertwined conceptually, coming together into a fluid yet unified whole, much the way the fluid experience of cinema derives from the sequencing of fixed, discrete components. As a result, Visitants can be thought of as a kind of spatial movie, where the objects, the videos, the narration and the installation are all elements that are to be pieced together — or “edited”, as in editing a film — in each individual’s mind. As El Ultimo Grito has stated:
If we consider reality as our own perception of the world, then we could say there are as many versions of the same event as there are people. It is only by establishing some external accord on the means, context, morality, etc., that we are able to come to pockets of consensual “what’s going ons” and “what have just happeneds.”
This simultaneously syncretic and synthetic approach to exhibition-making that underlies Visitants also reflects the broader creative and theoretical processes, known as Physical Editing, that El Ultimo Grito has developed through its expanded artistic and design practice, while also employing it as a teaching methodology in its academic work.
In addition, from a narrative perspective Visitants is premised as a ‘prequel’ to El Ultimo Grito’s recent acclaimed exhibition and curatorial project EARTH: A RETROSPECTIVE at the Bombas Gens Centre d’Art (Valencia), which took as its conceptual point of departure the idea of using art objects and cultural artifacts as a means of looking back toward present-day Earth from some uncertain future vantage point. Instead, Visitants inverts the temporal perspective, viewing that same uncertain future but looking forward toward it from the vantage point of a similarly uncertain present via the art works on view.
Within this conceptual framework, Visitants casts a wide net of literary and cinematic references —to the writings of Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, the Strugatsky Brothers, as well as to films and film theory such as Chris Marker (in particular his time-travel masterpiece La Jetée) and the montage theories of Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein. These references, however are more implicit than explicit, embedded within while also embodied by the individual works and the overall experience that, taken together, comprise Visitants.
Visitants is El Ultimo Grito’s third exhibition at Galería Elba Benítez.
Press release text by George Stolz, 2024
Smile and wave, 2024
Installation. Video (color, sound, loop, 30’’)
Smile and wave, 2024
Installation. Video (color, sound, loop, 30’’) deck chairs (wood and digital print on canvas)
Roadside picnic, 2024
Installation. Copper structure, The present is all we have (2 videos on LCD monitors, b/w, loop, 30’’), 2 digital prints on stretch net
The present is all we have, 2024
(2 videos on LCD monitors, b/w, loop, 30’’)
Roadside picnic, 2024
Installation. Copper structure, The present is all we have (2 videos on LCD monitors, b/w, loop, 30’’), 2 digital prints on stretch net
Visitants, 2024
Video (color, sound, English O.V., 8’50’’)
VISITANTS_film transcript
Stories do not have a beginning or an end, not really.
Stories do not have protagonists or, for that instance, plot. Just adulterated perspectives, myths, synthetic descriptions of reality, far too complex to be expressed in words.
We are, at best, secondary characters of our own stories, mere anecdotes in the flux of time, homeopathic time, a second dissolved in eternity, no big finales. Stories last for as long as there’s someone interested in its narration, or an audience interested in listening
This story is no different, it does not really start here, and will definitely not deliver an ending.
It was dawn at exactly that moment when the reds completely abandon the horizon, everything becomes cut-outs against a dark blue sky gradually fusing to black.
We turned around and ran, desperately, as if our life depended on it… it did, as everything behind us crushed into obliviated landscape, instantly forgotten in the vastness of time. We kept ahead, consuming moments that seconds later never were… We were late. Chillingly staring at the horizon we cried… the wind softly hitting our faces, the mist slowly washing ashore, washing assured, washing.
We waved a mental goodbye to those leaving as we followed their fading white trails left behind. History departed with them, never to come back. Humanity had departed well before it ever knew, riding on the jet stream of a forever-fading sense of belonging, waiting to fulfil its destiny. They left behind a dissolving world for us to escort into oblivion. Humankind has left the room.
Smile and wave.
There’s no reality, realities maybe, only pockets of consensual “what’s going ons” and “what has just happeneds”… Our being will not be recorded, categorised or analysed, we will just be, time encoded in life itself. Our narration will end with us. Our voice will extinguish naturally, it will not be censored, ridiculed or dehumanized, only humans can do that. The present is all we have, the confluence of time and space.
Smile and wave… smile… and wave… Smile!
It came. We could see it coming, we could, but could not do anything but stare, a scene of beauty, like everything that threatens us, both exciting and scary… absorbing. A breath on our faces… maybe that was it. For as much as we were there, that fact could only mean one thing, and that was too terrifying to accept, so we ignored it.
Life had embedded itself into structures and places oblivious to our understanding. Its provenance: unknown. Who cared. It camouflaged itself into our everyday lives exo-organically harbouring the spread of a new dawn. Not a hostile take over, in-seeded, genetically transformative imprints without return.
We are leaving, we are living, we are leaving, we are living, we are leaving, we are living… devoid of our own history. Destiny has the habit of knowing what’s best. We are leaving… We are living!
We left our bodies, bio-suits, which only purpose was to keep us alive while transitioning. We were no more, but we still were. Stared at by our decaying materiality, flesh abandoned like a serpent’s shed skin, carriers, delivering that which cannot be preserved… the archaeological destiny of design. A history defined by that which is lost, inferred from the permanence of the disposable… wine, a perfume… a soul.
Remained, not as we were but as we became. Better or worse, that’s a dilemma for history to resolve, if indeed history remained a thing, not for us but for those who left. For us it just was… it was. It felt good, but maybe there was no alternative, but it felt good. We could finally just be… undead in the renewal process of nature, life and death as an inclusive regenerative continuum. All that was left were residual memories, scraps from a roadside picnic… perhaps.