Conquista básica te vuelvo a pedir que te definas, 2004
Javier Peñafiel (Spain, 1964). Video. Ed. 1/3. 1’09’’
Still Conquista básica te vuelvo a pedir que te definas, 2004
Even if the person who provoked it disappears, the smell remains. Is desire provoked? Can democracy be provoked?
The video Basic Conquest, I Ask You Again to Define Yourself addresses these questions. A transparent ballot box, the bag of a vacuum cleaner and the enigmatic operation, in ritual mode, of an unidentifiable person.
Basic Conquest, I Ask You Again to Define Yourself are words with a sense of melodrama and at the same time of acquired rights. In many cases our methodologies of equality turn out to be hierarchical distributions of an immense void. Many people have seen in this video something like a vaginal resonance, others an ironic play with visibility or the enigmatic reconstruction of magic tricks, while yet others have had feelings of uneasiness that come from looking at videos as if they were mirrors.
For me, after the gestures of that unrecognizable someone, something remains in the place of that strange ritual. Between the voids of the ballot box and the yellow bag there might be a deliciously sweet and sour smell. One more activity has taken place, a ceremony in accordance with chaos itself. Afterwards the smell and the object that is the ballot box remain. The subject has disappeared, gone with his customs and negotiations.
It is the persistence of that which has not found a solution, of unforgettable events. The expectant need to go back to a problem, in a mixture of biography and hypnosis, is similar to the fact of recognizing a particular smell and seeing that it is no longer exactly the same, a heady sensation of fleeing from the learned world.
Javier Peñafiel
