GUILLOTINÆ Wanna Cry, Act Yellow: Break Room

2021 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

25:29 minutes

Sofía Córdova

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Set some time in the future, Sofía Córdova’s multi-channel film installation GUILLOTINÆ Wanna Cry, Act Yellow: Break Room imagines a public that worships pop stars and revolutionary leaders equally. The three channels of the video blend visual materials from pop culture, politics, news, and fine art, as well as choreographed dancers miming quotes from philosophers, reality television stars, radical political figures, and YouTube comment sections. Intermittently, they are interrupted or obscured by archival footage of press conferences, rallies, revolutions, invasions, and uprisings from the last century. On the internet, pop culture often shares media space with political information, yet the two are not afforded the same gravitas despite their shared relevance to a mainstream public. In GUILLOTINÆ , all information (visual and aural) is equal, unsettling viewpoints that categorise news items as “important” or “deep” and entertainment as “unimportant,” or “shallow.” Like much of Cordova’s work, this video subverts hegemonic messaging around productivity that implores us to create when the economic, political, and social systems we know and rely upon are crumbling and we are complicit in its ruin. Córdova asks: how does one create when dire circumstances transform our day-to-day? The dancers seem to say: our surroundings create us.

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Sofía Córdova’s films make many noises. Whether subtle, soothing, or disturbing, her practice contains questions about feminism, the Earth, power, liberation, migration, extinction, and extractive capitalism. Through time-warped fabulations, the artist speeds time up or slows it down, transmitting visions from the future to make sense of how power operates in the present. In other words, she explores the possibility of many futures through a plurality of audio-visual experiences condensed into a single digital experience. Córdova’s speculations combine crunchy electronic soundtracks with images of green forest beings or an ethereal, organic score that contextualises horrific personal narratives. This aesthetic experience troubles the notion that normalcy is guaranteed in the future—or at least what we humans on Earth know as normalcy—asserting that comfort on our planet is not guaranteed despite our best (and worst) efforts to alter our surroundings.

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Colors:

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• culture.n.01
• politics.n.01
• medium.n.10
• dance.n.01
• protest.n.01