Round and Round and Consumed by Fire, 2009
Single-channel video, DVD Blue Ray, colour, sound. 8’
Claudia Joskowicz. Round and Round and Consumed by Fire, 2009
This video is part of a trilogy recreating different moments in the history of Bolivia. The first of the three works centred on the quartering of Tupac Katari, the leader of the indigenous uprising in Bolivia against the Spanish colony in the 18th century; the second examined the presentation and documentation through photos of Che Guevara’s corpse, assassinated in Vallegrande in 1967; while the third, presented here, focuses on the death of Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, the famous US bank robbers, in a crossfire following their last robbery, in 1905, in a village in the south of Bolivia. Now part of the collective imaginary, this last story was turned into a western movie in 1969: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Joskowicz’s work is a circular take of the moment prior to the beginning of the shootout that ended the lives of the robbers. The work emphasises the intersection of space-time axes, and the slowness with which the camera pans the scene discloses not only the artifice of the tableau vivant, but also reveals place as a fundamental element in the narrative. On relocating the scene in Bolivia, the story is reinscribed within a specific geographical context, highlighting the relationship between memory and place.
