by Laura Barreca
We have seen them several times, the recent history is full of images of teargas against the crowd, of soldiers dressed up in disgusting armors scattering unarmed protesters. Not so long ago, the images of the Arab Spring have crossed the whole world through videos, tv news, but at the very beginning through low quality images taken with mobiles launched fast in the web and social networks. A bottom – up civil revolution, exploded as a virus, that has involved a crowd overwhelmed by a power that debased life conditions and limited social rights. This invisible enemy is called social tension, a condition that brings a country and its people back to seasons of rage, unsatisfaction, depression along with a lack of hopes for the future gathering together in a dangerous and unmanageable mix. It is the anger that leads to the scuffles, the indignation to the protests in the streets, that form of humiliation the community reacts to with an unexpected violence. Sometimes moments anticipate revolutions, or push to a radical change.
Julieta Aranda, used to question about the relations between person and community and the dynamics that move social behaviours, through media as well, tries to catch and make real the tension within a community, the existential discomfort of the contemporary society. The biggest depressions, they say, are the result of little, small frustrations, annihilation of the soul gathering together in a bigger discomfort. In this perspective Julieta Aranda translates the artist poetic role into an ethical engagement, aimed not to represent reality rather to interpret it, suggesting new and original keys finding in the smoke abstract rarefaction the allegory to explain the social discomfort. Where There’s Smoke comes from an ideal and ironic association: the indefinite shape of smoke, its intrusiveness, the set phrases suggesting different metaphors, starting from the title of this project, that means “wherever there is smoke, there is fire”. In the military strategies the smoke is a defence creating an unbreakable screen, able to hide movements either of vehicles or men to the enemy. In a figurative sense it represents the falsification of reality, changing the soul and mind awareness with confusing substances, compromising mind abilities. In her artworks, Julieta Aranda, prefers to explain not only political events but the consequent social feeling as well, the contradictions within the ordinary life. Not an ideological thought but a model of alternative and independent judgement. Within the exhibition low-fi footages of Manhattan roads and the smoke coming from the cement, turning the manhole cover into an imaginary pressure regulator of the earth; the black or white smoke of the Pope election, sticking to the tv set several people; the high column coming out from a fake volcano, blackening the sky with fear and concern.
Picking the images, Julieta Aranda chooses to show a web structure, a comic-like structure, where the evanescence of the smoke comes real in a thick texture, a screen made of millions of multi coloured dots. These representations answer to a demand of the artist unveiling the dynamics of communication of contemporary media, suggesting the ways how the public opinion is often manipulated through the information.
Julieta Aranda, interested also in the Latin-American identity and how it has been instilled through the television (In search of lost time, 2011), suggests to overcome the invisible shade of smoke obscuring our sight and integrity, and to use media and technology not only as means of cultural sovereignty, but also as common forms of critical thinking.
