Someday a first man said, "This cave is mine". For quite a long time I‘ve been thinking about producing a work in which I express the idea that violence is not a natural characteristic of humans as many people say, but it comes as reaction, facing an unwanted circumstance, feeling aggressed, violated. When philosophers Luca De Pietri and Giorgio Palma invited me to the event Il Corpo Violato (The Violated Body), I felt it was the catalyser of an old project, and explained them my idea of producing a video installation in which someone is invaded in his space, physically and culturally. Since the beginning I established a relation between music and culture, and that leaded me to the idea of mixing the name of an instrument and the word violence. This was the beginning of Viola-Me (Violate me). El cosa (The thing) is someone who represents nobody. His face is white and flat, with no color, no character and he inhabits an environment impregnated with his presence. So I decided to create three large size paintings to represent the walls, using oxidized iron plates to stamp shapes of things, and iron pigment with terracotta to print figures of my body on the canvas. Four people enter the space pushing a piano, creating a wall that divides the area in two sides. When they notice the presence of El cosa in the other side, they start to pile books on top of the piano, building an even higher barrier with their culture. After that, they bring three chairs, three violas and start to tune their instruments. Feeling invaded, El cosa expresses his unhappiness and, having no dialogue, rejects the invasion by destroying the elements in an in crescendo rhythm, according to his feelings. His aggressive behaviour leading him to the feelings of pain and sorrow for himself and for his aggressor is my main discourse in Viola-Me, the involuntariness and sadness contained in violence and the apathy of modern society about it. |
The composition Trío para violas y piano ausente (Trio for violas and absent piano) invites to reflect on the self complacency and ethnocentrism in which we sometimes fall, not only in Western culture but in all others. In the context of the installation Viola-Me, it refers to the contrast created when we shut ourselves in our own values, our own alienation and it becomes a mask that inhibits us from acting and being coherent. The piece is built on a harmonic pattern that is repeated constantly and over which draws a melodic and melancholic line. The central part of the piece allude to contrapuntal procedures that represent the search for roots in the past but, being not resolved in the present, return to the initial pattern, constant, obsessive and distant. Iván Lorenzana |
