Detonación, 2010
Cardboard, tape, LEDs screen, arduino and cable. Variable dimensions.
Ingrid Buchwald (Tolosa, 1980) bases her work on the observation of her surroundings, the interaction between humans and their environment, which is now predominantly urban. Detonación combines an interest in a topical issue (terrorism) with a philosophy from the past and a familiar technology: home-made bombs are activated by a conversation on Skype between two people who seem to be conjuring, in a secret code, the good old days of Thoreau and a return to a simple cabin life. But this idea suddenly meets the 21st century and evokes the lair of the Una Bomber, whose intentions were also a return to bucolic rural life.
Detonación talks about the possibility of rebooting the system, of breaking away from everything and recovering a simple country life, swimming in a lake, fishing, losing oneself, leaving the pace of contemporary life behind, all from the perspective of the 21st century: Isidore and Claire make plans to withdraw to the country, build a hut and start again, without us knowing absolutely anything about their current life or their past. The word “utopia” has Greek roots and means “no place” or a “non-place.” An imagined place is the expression of a desire. In order to find a new world, the previous world must be destroyed.
In a small city called Concord near Boston, Massachusetts, a small group of intellectuals flourished in the 19th century and transformed philosophy, literature and poetry, while also turning their energies to civil rights and political thought. The father of the group was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was joined by Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne and other less famous names who were part of the North American avant-garde and became known as the transcendentalists. This philosophical school defends the idea that an individual can only achieve true independence through intuition and direct observation of the laws of nature. Thoreau was the first person who expressed the right to civil disobedience, a kind of “what if...” about the human conditions and the laws that govern it. And Buchwald shifts this idea to the dangerous frontier of the 21st century.
