Return, 2003
Single-channel video projection, b/w, sound. 3’ 23”
Miguel Ángel Ríos. Return, 2003
This work was created from a collective action by a group of players of a street game using spinning tops in Tepoztlan, Mexico, where players of many different ages compete with their tops in a grid drawn on the ground. The video is a metaphor for collective cohabitation, remitting both to the conflict in interpersonal relationships as well as to the fight for territory. Playing to open up space among agents in a specific field, to maintain the status quo or to transform the social structure, resonates poetically in this piece. Here dynamics of power, control, competition and invasion are re-enacted in a metaphorical narrative; kindling a reflection on the meaning of being with others in the world, in a state of tension yet at once integration. A possible reading from the perspective of current world geopolitical conditions, represented by waves of migration and the displaced, posits the need to reconfigure the sentient from the spatial.
