ART CITIES:Berlin-Sebastian Diaz Morales

Sebastian Diaz Morales’ work draws upon the traditions of South American avant-garde cinema, narrative film, and documentary practice to create films and video installations. In his films and videos,Diaz Morales explores the possibilities of video from a perspective that falls somewhere between documentarism and reinterpretation of a reality seen through playfulness, irony, and a pained scepticism

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo carlier|gebauer Gallery Archive

Sebastian Diaz Morales presents his video installation “Talk with Dust”, which is composed of 8 video works and explores the idea of the fantastic or extraordinary. This fantastic is not the one that interrupts the ordinary course of things but rather that which is at once strange and present, at the same time its contradiction and its confirmation. For something to be fantastic, it is not enough to be different from the real: also (and above all) it is necessary to mix inexplicably with the real thing. In more philosophical terms we can say that the fantastic is not the other of the same but its alteration: not the contradiction of the real, but its subversion. That is why the cinematic condition of the fantastic, which on the other hand can serve as an exact definition, is not at all in the production of real or supernatural beings, but in the fact that they affect what is recognized as real and natural through a contagion of the other who comes to seize the same in person. The feat made by the fantastic cinema does not consist only in this visible manifestation of the real as another. These are duplicated, in fact, and apparently paradoxically, by the work of an invocation of the Real as such, considered in its effective and singular existence; and in a way that is in itself quite strange. In “Talk with Dust”, Diaz Morales once again returns to the harsh, arid Patagonian landscape that has significantly shaped his artistic language. Spreading across six-channels displayed in two rooms of the gallery, “Talk with Dust” opens with a vertical projection of road shot from a moving vehicle. With the camera focused entirely on the asphalt, we don’t see any of the surrounding landscape, and with its whirring yellow lines and patchy zig-zags of tar, this view of Patagonia’s route 26 dissolves into something that resembles a Structuralist film more than a scenic drive— thereby setting the tone for a journey without a clear destination. Over the video’s six channels, which un-fold over screens of different sizes and orientation, we encounter a slow-burning candle, a drummer improvising, an explosion, and a car cycling endlessly in the desert. Through the viewers’ own movement through space, these isolated occurrences form their own asynchronic narrative and generate a fragmented world—rich mental and material territories on the other side of the real” where the fantastic re-sides.

Info: carlier|gebauer Gallery, Markgrafenstraße 67, Berlin, Duration: 14/3-30/5/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.carliergebauer.com