Post, distopía. Curaduría de Gonzalo de Benito para PROYECTOR en White Lab

Tseng Yu Chin (twn), DING Chien-Chung (twn), Juan José Pereira (par), Christian Lagata (esp), Przemek Węgrzyn (pol), Julia Lucesole (arg) – Amelia Orden (arg) – Vanessa Salamanca Vásquez (col), Bob Bicknell-Knight (ing)

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The audiovisual and conceptual proposal housed in the White Lab space is defined by concepts as resonant and sadly current as dystopia, ruin, collapse and abandonment. Desolate places, altered natures and chaos in images, wrapped in a sonic aura charged with timeless discourses; All this creates a somewhat sinister environment but at the same time attractive for the visitor to the exhibition, at the same time that it immerses them in a digital post-reality that they well recognize. These are audiovisual pieces that show crude images that make us reflect on contemporary society and the future -or one of the possible futures- that awaits us.

In Shivering wall, the Taiwanese artist Tseng Yu Chin proposes a contemplative scene in which the viewer can see his own body and spirit reflected. A young girl wakes up in what seems like the morning after a big orgiastic party. While some other characters try to move or settle in slow motion, she remains undaunted. A slight flash of light subtly sways across the image. The piece asks us: what is the connection between you and others? Witnesses in tension, by Juan José Pereira, is a three-phase dialogue, sometimes simultaneous and sometimes opposed, between the different architectural elements and inhabitants of a city that is both broken and scarred.

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Christian Lagata shows us in A World in Ruins the perfect definition of dystopia, the ‘antithesis of the perfect society, a totally undesirable place product of the failures of‘ progress ’’, in words that the author himself collects from the writer Leonardo Lippolis. Through an excellent montage in which he mixes audios and real images of two moments of demolition and destruction of buildings, he makes us see the reality of the point we have reached in our quest for control and total security within the cities in which we live. Beautiful and brutal piece Scarcity by Przemek Węgrzyn, which, like a fable or story narrated by a hypnotic voice-over, takes us on a journey around what has been the entrance of man into the rhythm and ecosystem of Nature, and its devastating consequences.
 

Structure, rotation and space. Those are the three concepts that define the Vacant room installation by DING Chien-Chung. True visual poetry, the moment of movement. The space is totally transformed with a subtle action. In Inespera, the factory is a place of transformation, of dehumanization and where revelation can occur. ' This is what its creators, Julia Lucesole, Amelia Orden and Vanessa Salamanca Vásquez say, and they are very right. Breaking imposed schemes and models, both in the audiovisual technique and in the narrative, Inespera talks about the natural in man and his relationship with the environment and the most brutalist architecture. Each shot of this piece is a work of art on its own.

Finally, I Wish I'd Been Born a Balloon, by Bob Bicknell-Knight which is, without further ado, a journey - literal and metaphorical - of an existentialist and complaining drone, who laments the purely military use they give it while wandering for the dystopian city of the video game "Grand Theft Auto V". Simply brilliant.

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Gonzalo de Benito

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