HUGE MOBILES / MANDARINO MARIONETA
Temixco, Mexico, 1987 / Huitzilac, Mexico, 2001
Video, stereo, color, 4:3
Two early Schwebezustand works
HUGE MOBILES, TEMIXCO, 1987. PROMPTEDAnalogue Canon F1, 35mm, color, C45, 50mm, f5.6. Temixco, México. A typical low-class suburban house, not finished construction, but occupied. Around 16:00. The sun to the left. The photographer stands up. The abandoned land around the house was actually a garden, but now different local plants grow. Two old oil barrels under a tree, with suspended construction rods inside., NO DOCUMENTATION AVAILABLE
In Temixco, 1987, I inserted construction rods into two petroleum barrels and suspended them from above. One pull. The barrels sounded by themselves for a long time. I stood there and listened.
The barrels remained in my garden for about a year, rusting in the sun, waiting for me to move them. I did. Then I stopped.
MANDARINO MARIONETA, HUITZILAC, 2001. PROMPTEDCanon, MiniDV from 2001, handheld, 4:3. Cropped, 90-degree corners, not curved corners. Midday. Video texture. Garden, outside, ca. 17:00. Small citrus, kumquat tree about 1.5 meters high, with some fruit visible. The tree is about 6 meters away from the camera. Well-maintained garden, but not perfect. The tree has a tree ring, with small wild plants in it, chaotic, with a bit of grass around. The grass in the garden is not homogeneous, with different tones of green and yellow. One branch on the right side of the tree is in gentle motion, but not the rest. The moving branch has to be part of the tree, not distant. You can see the leaves, but a bit motion-blurred, not so much. The camera guy, apart from holding the camera, is pulling the tree with one thin black sewing thread. The geometry of the thread: departs from the center of the frame, taped to the camera lens, very out of focus because it is too near; a bit further away, to disappear near the tree. No parts of the cameraman's body are visible. Behind, a wall covered with cement and some plants. Behind the wall 2 or 3 huge cold-forest trees, and behind them, more trees like them, in the shadow., NO DOCUMENTATION AVAILABLE
In Huitzilac, 2001, fourteen years later, my garden again. I tied a thin black sewing thread to the trunk of a young mandarin tree and gently pulled. The tree moved as it would move in the wind. There was no wind. I stood there as marionettist and watched, and then I stopped. The tree did not.
Fourteen years passed, and a life: a marriage, a daughter, a divorce, piano tuning, Nancarrow's assistance, scores, scholarships.
I had no name for what connected these intuitions and did not ask to understand them.
They were, in fact, the mother cells of my future work: a perceptual and ontological condition in which an object or being simultaneously inhabits more than one state of existence without resolving into either, while remaining recognizably itself.
I miss them.