AT THE BACK, BEHIND THE PARADE
Itziar Barrio. AT THE BACK, BEHIND THE PARADE, 2011.
Description:
In this project entitled AT THE BACK, BEHIND THE PARADE, Itziar Barrio explores the iconographic apparatus of popular festivities and parties and examines the particular features of their social registers, taking this as her starting point for embarking on an at tempt to reconstruct the codes of our milieu based on the idea of the fiesta. In doing so, she will adopt certain signs associated with the imaginary of fiestas, which she will then takes apart in order to generate her own fictions and to shape new mythologies. In this manner, she will convey to us the way in which, in this coded terrain, the consumption of certain signs gradually lays the foundations for the construction of our identity. Converging in this place of encounter between contemporary art and anthropology are elements in seeming opposition: contemporary society and traditional societies. The possible confluences and divergences are presented in a series of symbol-images that go from the apparent to the concealed.
At the far end of the room, there is a disconcerting element that creates a sense of unease that forces you to come closer. As in every horror film, the protagonist opens the door, drawn by a predictable noise. This element is a wall, a small spot created in a corner at the back that alludes to that place where things happen. It is that corner, spotless during the daytime, that is transformed by the power of the night into the hideaway of all things forbidden and covert, urine, sex, drugs, etc. With a violent charge from which the night, like so many other connotations, cannot free itself. In this way, Barrio manages, with the simplicity of a corner, to cover an entire repertoire of attributes of the night, the fiesta, that space in which social codes change and conventions become lax, that redoubt granted the power of unthinkable permissiveness by the lack of light. Here once again we find the ritual component, which is also related as a return to the darkness, to that which conceals the hideaway
Medium:
Installation
Tags:
party, installation, public space, video, parade, celebration, group dynamics, catharsis
Previous
Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
