Caja Tarro Silla Marco | 2011 | Single-channel video | 6’52’’
*First Prize Lichter Art Award, Frankfurt, Germany (2011)
In the video Caja Tarro Silla Marco, the artist travels through a landscape of the Argentine countryside where, camera in hand, she alternates different random adventures in which the industrial world always appears filtering into nature. She gravitates to the heights of a disused bridge, crouches on the sides of a train track, finds abandoned debris on the banks of a river. All situations where the suspense and the way things work seem to combine the idea of the future as a recurring question.
Testa | 2007 | Single-channel video | 7’37’’
Many times my videos are also related to sculpture and materials. In the video Testa, for example, the most emblematic buildings of Brutalism appear, such as the Bank of London or the National Library, both in Buenos Aires. One of my actions was to spill a bucket full of cement on one of the concrete railings of the library terrace. Before this, I show a shot where I follow a fat woman several meters down the street. I show the proportions of her body in relation to the brutalist building. I put together a love story with the phrase “fucking with you was reinforced concrete.” The fresh cement on reinforced concrete was also a homoamorous relationship between the two states of the same material, the moist and almost liquid material with the solid material. Architecture, sculpture and the body have always been problems that interested me.
Luciana Lamothe in interview with Dalia Cybel
5 Acciones | 2005 | Single-channel video | 3’19’’
In 5 actions Lamothe records acts of vandalism in which she takes the possibilities of tools to the extreme: she subverts their initial function focused on production or repair and uses them for a destructive purpose. They are small-scale acts of sabotage in public spaces characterized by their focused and anonymous nature, as Feda Baeza said about them.
The sense of sabotage, in these cases, takes the form of a construction, and closes the circle of the concepts of the tools, which is the basis of L.L.’s project: the basic interactions between function, object and context are derived from the tool-function-use triangle; the definition of function as a collection of physical capacities which show the tool as an agent of change, used by a user/saboteur charged with planning, executing and documenting actions; and, lastly, the mutual implication between these processes of destruction and any constructive project. This point states the two most important themes to emerge from the triangle, and which will form the basis for the most recent works produced by Lamothe: architecture as modern construction and, through this, the violence of one material upon another.
Text excerpt by Leandro Tartaglia y Pablo Accinelli
Autor Material | 2005 | Single-channel video | 10’11’’
In Autor material Lamothe records acts of vandalism in which she takes the possibilities of tools to the extreme: she subverts their initial function focused on production or repair and uses them for a destructive purpose. They are small-scale acts of sabotage in public spaces characterized by their focused and anonymous nature, as Feda Baeza said about them.
In Lamothe’s work, the actions in an urban space have three constituent authors. One plans, another executes and another documents. The first thinks out the action and its logistics; the second carries it out; and the third performs the act of looking, of framing, of documenting. All three are integral to the carrying out of the act, and the act of each one precedes that of the next. One plans, the next cuts or paints or glues or ties, the last frames and documents. The second makes a physical intervention somewhere following the script of the first; the third photographs that intervention. The subject of the third is the action of the second, while the subject of the second is the ideas of the first. Idea (plan), action (execution) and recording (documenting) are thus phases combined in a single process. This continuity between the conception, execution and documentation of the sabotage introduces a new concept, which works in parallel with the concept of physical transformation: criminal planning.
Text excerpt by Leandro Tartaglia y Pablo Accinelli