Illusion of Matter

2015 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

4:57 minutes (looped)

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

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Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s performance Illusion of Matter establishes a dream state through a composition of motifs that were drawn from the artist’s childhood memories. Ramírez-Figueroa recreated the components of the dream as giant props made out of polystyrene, and set in a colorful yellow and orange mise-en-scene. Throughout the performance, the props and set are activated and demolished by children under the artist’s direction. The performance culminates with Ramírez-Figueroa walking slowly towards the camera holding a ghostly mask/figure in front of his body. This work was the first in an ongoing commission by the performance network Corpus, for which Ramírez-Figueroa attempted to exhaust his interest into the Guatemalan Civil War.

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In Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s practice, performance and narrative are interwoven through the use of sculptural objects that link pre-Columbian civilizations, seditious brotherhoods, evangelism, and imperialism. In an unsettling dream-like fashion, many of the artist’s works operate as non-narrative fictions that depart from his personal experience of Guatemalan history—particularly the country’s civil war that ran from 1960 to 1996 and in which members of his family took an active part—but always distancing himself from a documentary take on history. Thus, the artist creates fable-like situations, which mix memories and visions from his childhood with a dose of pathos and humor, to address cultural and political events such as the war’s genocide of Mayan populations, the infiltration of Mormon missionaries in the country, and the contemporary followers of apocalyptic conspiracies.

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Colors:

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• war.n.01
• colonialism.n.01
• movement.n.04
• power.n.01
• autochthonal.s.01
• child.n.01