Pasajes I

2012 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
12:30 minutes

Sebastián Díaz Morales

location: Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina

year born: 1975

gender: male

nationality: Argentinian

Pasajes I is the first in a series of Sebastián Díaz Morales’s four videos Pasajes , which focuses on a solitary man walking through Buenos Aires. He walks through churches, shops, and libraries—accessing completely different interior spaces simply by going through doors. The seamless editing allows the man to transcend locations: after he enters a house from a busy intersection he emerges in the halls of a school. Through our guide we catch glimpses of the city, making the video an intriguing tour of the Argentine capital. We experience different lives, wealth, and employment. Never stopping to take in his surroundings, or to question where he’s going, he keeps on walking relentlessly—a possible allegory for man’s continued searching and struggle for something better and something more. It enforces an idea of progress, never sleeping, and the quest to always move on. The smart officious clacking of shoes of our guide recalls a businessman, flowing around the city, unable to leave. When this film was made, Argentina had imposed controls on movements in their territorial waters in order to block foreign companies drilling for oil, and was experiencing a period of economic growth before a period of harsh austerity. In Pasajes I we experience a complete freedom of movement, to all facets of society. Prosperous locations are accessed via underprivileged ones, and vice-versa. Díaz Morales flattens out these rudimentary distinctions, the city is an ecosystem where everything is symbiotic.

Raised in an isolated location between the Atlantic Ocean and the Patagonian Desert, Sebastián Díaz Morales believes his upbringing led him to a very particular way of perceiving the world around him. Using different filmic techniques, from narrative film-like works to found-footage, he explores the relationship between large-scale socio-political power dynamics and individual objectives. His films are often surreal, include no dialogue, and create a tension between reality, fiction, and representation in a visually abstract way. Morales’s films and videos are oftentimes surreal where social reality is reflected in a form that is visually abstract and fantasy-based. Most of his works study the relationships between a large-scale socio-political power and the actions of individuals; they reflect the interactions between people and their environment and social structures. The methods that Morales uses are twofold – in his works he uses both prepared scripts and the uncertainties of real life. His camera is focused on capturing documentary material, but he also uses footage that is experimental and that comes from the realms of science fiction.