VIDEO-INSTALLATION
New languages
In arteBA2002 we staged, together with the Generalitat Valenciana, Una visión de lo humano (A vision of the human condition), a project put together by artists Silvia Rivas, Carlos Trilnick and Ar Detroy – Charly Nijensohn. It was arteBA’s first proposal to introduce the public to the new languages in contemporary art that are not usual in exhibition rooms because of their complex and specific production.
arteBA emphasizes once more its vocation for the contemporary presenting Delta in Room 10, the video installation by Silvia Rivas and Carlos Trilnick, who this time invite visitors to the Centro Cultural Recoleta to walk through an imaginary space to become submerged in a particular atmosphere.
Commission Sala10
Landscape as metaphor
The video installation by Silvia Rivas and Carlos Trilnick stems from the need to fathom the origins of an austere and vulnerable land that has marked and shaped the character of its inhabitants, a land, that, in turn, has been marked and disfigured by atmospheric and political vicissitudes.
This Delta territory off the River Plate is a symbol of the destiny of a community that comes down from the first conquerors, who raided inland emboldened by an ambition that was out of proportion to the possibilities the invaded territory offered, and who ignored the basic laws of a possible productive coexistence.
The generations that followed modified the sense of this Delta across designs and references: pleasure and poverty, material want and the generous vegetation, water as a meeting place and water as a devastating agent.
Rivas and Trilnick capture visually a specific setting, an atmosphere, the landscape that stretches beyond the vision of the spectator. A geographic spot in which the expectations of the travelers and of the natives came a cropper without finding a resolution. The space in which illusions are deviated and abstracted from their original aims till they turn into frustrations. At the same time, the sounds we hear deviate and abstract our attention from nature introducing a feeling of malaise. A heavy sound of footsteps reminds us of the sorrows of the successive inhabitants of this territory and of the spirit of the territory. The spirit of a land that dislocated the best intentions of its inhabitants, and the spirit of the inhabitants who plundered the land without fertilizing it.
The authors have chosen and worked on this landscape as the metaphor of a society that does not hold itself responsible for the flow of history or for its future.
Alina Tortosa
Buenos Aires, June 2004
Delta
Delta arises as the identification of a place. The simple drawing of a triangle on a sheet of paper to trace the flat territory that is the scene and the blurred but tenacious reflection of our discourse.
On this diffused landscape it is the atmosphere that bears the marks of character, the marks that after a while dissolve into its ethereal milieu. Events slide as does the wind on the flatness of the land, on which the weak resistance of the reeds does not offer the material to carve a monument.
We have stubbornly looked for a definition, for the right words to explain an evident affinity with our work. Like a state of mind, the obvious to perception, becomes vague when put into words. Wondering and making idle notes on lose pages, we remembered that “imaginary treaty” by Juan José Saer, “El Río sin orillas” (The shore less river). It proved to be the right anchor. We drove posts into the ground to outline this territory that possesses us like a state of mind.
S.R. and C.T.
