Cabrero, I. : DESCIFRANDO EL CAOS. Generación 2014
Cabrero, I. : DECIPHERING CHAOS. Generation 2014 (English).
Leonor Serrano Rivas, in her project Public Collection proposes a new way of collecting based on the diverse, seemingly unrelated stories that our imagination begins to fabricate when we recognise an everyday image. Using state-owned art collections – one of the propaganda tools wielded by those in power- and incorporating film into her work, the artist compares and undermines fictions, appropriating them to show how the systems that currently govern and arrange our collective spaces contains implicit authoritative norms and precepts to which we have always been subject.
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Remote landscapes that seem to be part of a recent past are also featured in the project by Leonor Serrano Rivas (Málaga, 1986), photographs of familiar geographical settings that belong to a specific time period associated with the end of an era and a system that has become obsolete. They are unremarkable places on the fringe of civilisation, but their images may contain certain elements that could potentially be declared “cultural heritage assets”, and consequently catalogued and “registered” according to the rules established by the public authorities. These images printed on a screen are accompanied by a projection of decontextualized fragments from different suspense films, generating images that have nothing to do with the original plot or script.
As Beatriz Alonso explained in her essay “Sometimes in the Desert”, written for this catalogue to accompany the project, the state-owned art collection has historically been one of the most widely used mechanisms for legitimising and proclaiming the ideals of the powers-that-be. In Public Collection, the artist questions the obsolete way of “ordering” these collections and proposes “another order” that is more attuned to the present moment.
The projected images allude to the story lines of suspense films, specifically scenes categorised as “chiffhangers”, a plot device used to keep the audience on tenterhooks, sparking curiosity through a strong sense of anticipation. Leonor Serrano Rivas is preoccupied with the use of suspenseful twist to create, through the sequence of frames, a state of tension over what might happen, impatience to know how the story will play out.
Suspense itself is divided among the different screens, establishing a relationship with the photographs and causing the scene to somehow be suspended as well. By confronting legendary film sequences that apparently contrast with the photographs, the artist seeks to reveal the underlying meanings on the images. This process not only aims to make the spectator’s imaginary speak out, thus establishing and ideological link with the image, but it also attempts to highlight the invisible borders of politicised landscape, going above and beyond subjectivity. The artist notes that perhaps a more theoretical aspect is the relationship between the cognitive interest these unresolved film endings elicit in the spectator and the map of the landscape itself. She claims that in the end, we are dealing with subordinate narratives, as Victor Burgin would say, similar to a dream state.
These dream states are also accompanied by sound, in which the act of humming the soundtrack creates an ambience that envelops the images. The resulting work is something halfway between fiction and historical documentary, where the fabricated environment attempts to forge a borderline link between the conscious and the subconscious – an apparent chaos in need of deciphering.
We as spectators must “produce our own film” based on the personal memories triggered by these images – the images stored in our cinematographic memory- and how those memories relate to the landscapes we are shown, turning them into just another sequence of the film so that, without realising it, we end up granting them the status of “cultural heritage assets”.
In this way, the artist invites us to come up with new stories, create new realities based on the images bequeathed to us by an obsolete system and a story we no longer believe to be true.
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