Installationview Galleri Box, 2006
Photo Henrik Zeitler

Extended Arguments

In the exhibition Extended Arguments the artist explores the relationship between violence and silence.
This is created through two video works.

The first video is based on a documentary footage from a football match. It shows the qualifications to the world cup held in Chile’s capital city Santiago in 1973 between Chile and the Soviet Union. The game takes place in the sadly well-known Estado Nacional, a football arena that was transformed in to a torture and detention centre during the military cup regime. The Chilenian team “wins” the game, due to the fact that the Soviet football team didn’t take part in the event as a statement to the political situation in the country.

The other piece “Notions of conflict. Dance of the Piñata” explores human interaction through the utilisation of a traditional artefact, the piñata. A material object that embodies the extreme forms of violence emerging through the colonial process in Latin America where the piñata was used as a pedagogical tool in the “christianisation” of the “natives” But also in the forms of resistant and hybridisation that has made the piñata a part of Latin American popular culture present at celebrations party and birthdays.

The dialogue between the two pieces is constructed through the boundaries between visible and invisible practises of violence. In the first video the extreme forms of violence, which are the core of this football game, are silenced (and rejected).
What we see constructs a “safe”, “secure” image, and without context, the violence disappears.

Through the use of a piñata the second video, violently challenges the margins between play and non-play. It speaks to us through a focus on the actual process of des-humanisation. We see the violence that construct the subjectivity of a perpetrator and we see the violence that is able to disarm the human subjectivity, the one that makes us humans.
The other boundary, vital to the work, is the one between active and passive subject. How do “we” relate to violent events? Where do “we” position ourselves?
Undoubtedly a common position towards violent events is the process of des-identification with those that have been the target of violence. The football players play as if nothing had happened, as if their involvement has no consequences. The passivity of the actors within the first work changes drastically within the second where other aspects in relation to the active embodiment of violent practice are drawn (even if the artist covers the actors eyes).

The artist provides ways of developing resistance, towards violence, in the form of absence. The absence of the Soviet football team violently reframes the space where the football match is played; from a football arena to a detention centre. At the same time the other piece marks through the presence of a vulnerable body, but even more by the presence of a (un-) vulnerable desire to challenge power relations.