Diego DEL POZO BARRIUSO

EL TOPO Y LA ANGUILA Art vidéo, ANIMACIÓN | dv | color | 5'2'' | Spain | 2007 © "The Mole and The Eel" is a film about the Stock Exchange, emotional work, and the relationship between Economy and Emotion. It tells the story of two groups of underground people who have invented another type of economy during a period of war. Individuals belonging to these two groups choose to live a rather precarious existence, within the context of a supposedly abundant economy. It is also the story of two groups of anonymous people who belong to two classes and two different levels of production. They research subjective actions through the emancipation of the chain of emotional exchanges. In the film, the city, the river, the island and the networks of people operate on symbolic fashion forcing us to reflect on the problems and contradictions of our times. For the Meetings, the film is limited to a single channel version, but the film also works with the installation-video format, as well as with another video and several drawing series. Diego del Pozo Barriuso was born in Valladolid in 1974. He lives and works in Madrid. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Salamanca and Madrid, as well as at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Artist and cultural producer, he develops projects on the social production of body and of identity. His work is based on his interest for emotion, love and desire, and for the way in which these emotions associated to the private and subjective experience, are conditioned by our social environment, by power and by the methods of production. His work is also based on the idea that mechanisms of social control are internalized by the individual. Using different techniques and media-- drawing, installations, video, etc-- he brings us face to face with a reality in which our desires, which we think of as private and personal, are revealed to be constructions that instigate consumption or social control. Other text An article about Diego del Pozo Barriuso´s work AH DESIRE!. Mariano Mayer. - You know only too well that relationships depend on circumstances: everyday life, work, habits… but if you think we should split up, well then… desire makes you happy. We just need to clear a few things up, like the flat: I’m keeping it. - Keep everything! Everything! Everything! I just want it to be like it was before. I want to be just as I am again, just as I am. Rainer Fassbinder’s Fox and his Friends (1974) is one of those films in which such transformations are thematized like a table of periodic behaviour, whose forms of representation take on different names like “capitalism”, “system” or “industrial melodrama”, modelling their loving relationships on the market economy. Franz Biberkopf is a boy, played by Fassbinder himself, who earns a living as “Fox, the talking head” on a fairground until he acquires a lottery ticket worth half a million marks. The shift caused by his false rise in society leads to a subjugation of class whereby Franz, relishing his new situation, enters into middle class circles. In the midst of the euphoria brought about by these changes he meets Eugen, the son of a bankrupt businessman who turns Franz into his financial safe-conduct, persuading him to enter into the family business and buy the flat and the art deco furniture that they will use to inject him with middle class manners, and planning a trip to Marrakech only to leave him, as the sentence dictates, under the worst circumstances. Up to this point, a narrative of villains, paupers and greed before a backcloth of love that yearns for tragedy. But for this director, who wrote the manifesto “New German Cinema” (1962) while still an adolescent and without having made a single film, all stories become a means to activate and demonstrate the different forms of authoritarianism (state, private and familial). As such, the explicit amorous surrender, the choreography of seduction or confessional gestures admitting to the most deeply felt desires, unfold like an endless series of mechanisms for exploitation and control in which we can read between the lines a declaration of intentions whereby, “The maximum achievement would consist in a film for entertainment at the same time transmitting, in passing, political content.” With an almost surgical precision, this outrageous setting for profiling a theme (hypocrisy, middle class education) chooses trivial love as a way of saying as a kind of reflection or opinion that “love is the greatest, the most insidious and effective instrument for social repression.” The same technology of desire appears as a kind of index to the works of Diego del Pozo Barriuso, translated without assigning blame and using a black line, a dialectic of poses and desire where subjectivity performs roles, stagnates conditions and turns each fixation into an almost dual method for materialising or putting a name to whatever it is that intimacy, language and the body put into action. Recognisable silhouettes placed in everyday situations (working, loving) against a white background present a way to examine the social logic of norms and acceptance. Protocols of experiences, outlines or blackboard images that create a setting for contemporary tensions but with a certain politicised knowing wink; so: How can we reveal the imperceptible? How can we signal a dimension that resists capture and in which all imitation is disarticulated? Around La imagen más deseada different moments organise these vehicles of attention, whereby direct, clear graphic intent added together form the clarity of their intentions: to present a situation and confront it. Diego plays with these expectations of recognition captured from the drawing. We all know what to do – have quick look and check out the qualities -, this schoolboy gesture manages to turn solid; here, the delicacy of the drawing or its formal immediacy keeps up the thematic tension that it has brought to bear. The fine black line becomes political when it incorporates an interest where the experience turns out to be individual, bringing unease to the senses and that “mechanisation of thought” that facilitates the drawing’s longing to activate its quota for reflection. This expansive interest mediates between other languages and often leads to the work being dubbed “video-drawings”. A face simulates a portrait through a screen masked behind a frame (Los cambios del rostro), what we see are different modifications of the person’s face dictated by the reflections of the lover, a performative act whereby the exterior is unable to accommodate an inner impulse, and instead this mirrored action where we can see in the eyes of the “loved” something that the imaginary of desire considers fair: beard, another moustache, naïveté … Desire (more fittingly than ever) ensures that the recognition of the difficult operations of memory, retain what we thought to be lost. Through an aesthetic of memory and representation, the different parts that form La imagen más deseada generate a dialogue between the perceptive moment and what is happening; the pieces are built up from a dialogue. In this sense, Pieza para orgía y fabrica - one of the video-drawings that is central to this collection – adjusts its accessibility and formal simplicity in order to produce a focal point based on the vulnerable situations which the protagonists – two so far, affection and desire - have established: different people in recognisable working conditions (school, office or factory assembly line) and another group who have just taken part in an orgy. But there are characters who participate in both actions, underlining this modern hybridisation of two logics: the profitability of work and the logic of affection, that a highly effective totalitarian system knew how to shape, once the arguments had been defined - the norms of behaviour and applications between public and private. This intent to make the mixture visible, or the aspects that tell us that the logic of affection will never be inseparable from the logic of systems of production, comes from the juxtaposition of two moments and an audio clip in the form of a confessional monologue in which each account discovers this emotional productive logic (“I thought that I was going to feel liberated after something like this!”). The voices are heard one after the other, separated by the click of a lamp as it switches on, exposing what is happening privately, like the viewpoint of a voyeur. A detail that allows us to discern, momentarily, the type of work concealed by the title “social” and what occurs in the most intimate way behind, though conditioned by what came before. A consciousness where, as David Link suggests, “…what counts is on the outside, not inside: things, body, perceived spaces.” In this sense, sources of work and sex generate a dialogue between the moment perceived and what is happening, work is built up from this dialogue and from the clue that reflects on how the reward of false added value of labour becomes indiscernible from the enjoyment of the individual. This is a historical quality that was analysed by Michel Foucault, by which the body of the individual is one of the principle objectives of State intervention; La imagen más deseada seems to invite us, just as the philosopher suggested, to consider sexuality as the “art of governing oneself”. In these bodies mediated, either from the logic of webcam technology, where fictions are established, or from the technology of correspondence, where desire is transmitted through a collection of pre-digital letters, the body itself continues to represent the only ownership. Roland Barthes: “I’m going to tell you what I once did with my body. In Levsin in 1945, in order to perform an extrapleural pneumothorax, they took out a piece of my rib away, which they later returned to me solemnly wrapped in a medical gauze (the doctors, Swiss it has to be said, proclaimed that in this way my body belonged to me, whatever the state of dismemberment in which they returned it to me: I am the owner of my bones, both in life and in death).” In each one of these works there’s not only a concern to show a zone of dissident behaviours or a well thinking marginality that brings its task of visibility and regulation into sharp relief, in which each impulse works seismographically, but they also aspire to present that syncopated noise that appears between desire and affection beyond its protagonists, each time we try to verify a captured emotion. An exercise whose motive attempts to disarm or underline that field of operations transformed into relationships. As the artist himself has commented, “I am interested in generating tools, devices, mechanisms for mediation. This field of research is very important to me – how to generate a new form? – articulating the desires of a person, a conversation, a specific reality, politics together with an artistic language such as drawing or video. That mechanism for investigation into what is known as an alternative or as a renovation interests me more than the theme itself. It is an abstract mechanism, almost primary in relationships. ICEBERG OR VOLCANO? “Standby. You`re on the air. Buenos noches Señores y Señoras. Bienvenidos. La primera pregunta es: Que es mas macho, pineapple o knife? Well, let`s see. My guess is that a pineapple is more macho than a knife. Si! Correcto! Pineapple es mas macho que knife. La segunda pregunta es: Que es mas macho, lightbulb o schoolbus? Uh, lightbulb? No! Lo siento, Schoolbus es mas macho que lightbulb. Gracias. And we`ll be back in un momento …” This was how the electronic composer Laurie Anderson established through song (Smoke Rings) her theoretical preface to the system of performative analysis set out by Judith Butler in her celebrated work Gender Trouble (1990) which deconstructs the categories of gender and desire in order to map out the situation of all minorities, and to evaluate the tensions and politics by which an identity is articulated. Closer to home, Diego del Pozo Barriuso catches a glimpse of a gear system of associated postures in which a hybrid map allows him to displace himself. This potential multiform creates a magnifying glass that allows us to subtract forms of relationships in which the codes of behaviour, both assumed and domesticated, are thrown against new situations. Interpreted as another new chapter in the machinery for generating potential liberating discords, a model directed towards interrogations in a format that discovers behaviours like a field of operations. The trench of direct criticism holds no water, only hiding until it can profile a logic, responding with another approach to experiencing culture, a mirror that isn’t totally smooth that displays its own function. List of exhibition, filmography... Exhibitions: 07/ “Sin Prometeo...”. Cultural Center Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain). 06/ “La imagen más deseada”. Art Contemporary Center of Salamanca, DA2. “Sin Levedad”, Adora Calvo Art Gallery, Salamanca. (Spain). 05/ “ Horizonte trascendente”, Liquidación Total Art Space. Madrid. 03/ "Cuatro amantes, Cuatro inversiones”, Young Art Center. Autonomous Goverment of Madrid. Group Exhibitions: 08/ “Project (OR)”, MAMA, Rotterdam, (The Netherlands). “Glimpse”, Espaivisor, Valencia (Spain). 07/ “Heterotopías”, Oktogon of HFBK, Dresden (Germany). “Destino futuro” , Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid. “MMAC Awards”, Mollerussa, Lléida (Spain). 06/ “Terraplane blues” , La Casa Encendida, Madrid. 05/ “Radicáis libres: Experiencias gays y lésbicas na arte peninsular”, Auditorio of Galicia. Santiago de Compostela (Spain). 04/ “Generación 2004”, Caja Madrid Awards, La Casa Encendida. Madrid. 03/ “Generación 2003”, Caja Madrid Awards, La Casa Encendida. Madrid. “Circuitos 2003”, Young Art Center. Autonomous Goverment of Madrid. GO!, Liquidación Total Art Space, Madrid. 01/ " Ecosofías” Sala Amadís, Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Madrid. " Diálogos Lúdicos" Espacio Líquido Art Gallery, Gijón (Spain). With the group C.A.S.I.T.A.: 08/ “Reactivate!”, Espai de Arte Contemporani de Castelló. 07/ “Ganarse la vida: EL Ente Transparente”, Intermediae, Matadero of Madrid. Video Programs: 08/Metrópolis TVE. Program "Economías del trabajo". TVE. ”Videomix” .La Casa Encendida, Madrid. 07/ “Entresijos y Gallinejas (Nit CASM Madrit)”. Centre d´Art Santa Mónica, Barcelona. 05/ Video Festival LOOP 05 of Barcelona. Lub Program. Awards and Grants: 08/ Fine Arts Award Autonomous Goverment of Madrid. 06/Grant´s Casa de Velázquez of Madrid. Creation Award Montehermoso, Council Goverment of Vitoria-Gasteiz. Creation Grants´s Intermediae (Matadero of Madrid) with the group C.A.S.I.T.A. 05/ Fine Arts Award Autonomous Goverment of Madrid.