Foots, 2007
Site-specific installation for Valnalón, La Felguera
In his installation titled Foots, Cuco Suárez returns to some of the constants that have defined his latest work. The idea of the journey gains a new dimension from his perspective by identifying neo-colonial wars and conflicts with the transfer to third countries of the predatory ambitions and the subsequent violent strategies exerted on the civil population.
Containers are vehicles, the medium for transporting goods and weapons to make that domain real and also for those returning to the metropolis with the products of looting and its human cost: corpses and mutilated bodies.
Once again, the artist materialises the tension and violence, the anxiety and panic, generated by the insatiable voraciousness of the developed world and the consumer society. The identity of the victim assumed by the artist from his condition as a man committed with his time, emerges as a cry, as an extreme protest, in the materiality of a space, in which orthopaedic limbs in motion succeed each other.
The oppressive atmosphere and the image of mutilation combine to force a reflection and to stir the spectator’s consciousness, involving him or her in a by-no-means innocent, brutal and direct gaze that is a strategy of militant commitment in relation with the arms race and political interventions in the third world.
