Mioclony — Fer Sucari

Mioclony
Variable dimensions
Plaster, cement, ferrite, pigment, iron, wood
2015

A guy gets old and decides to recall something just to feel good. The urge to push a little further versus his Droopy-like gaze. Now we see him walking along a path overflowing with life. In the distance, there’s a bay and some kids lying among round rocks. With a subtle hand movement they manage to unlock an image that, until that moment, seemed frozen. As they wave at him, a voice-over tells us they are his parents when they were young. It’s the ending of Wild Strawberries. The water is calm, the father is fishing, and the mother is lying down, contemplating what could be a picnic day by the lake. H264 compression dismembers her body for a few seconds, while pixel-flies hover over the food. The laptop’s fan kicks in, the scene feels entirely plausible, and his reflexes return to calm. Within that stillness, the gaze takes its time to wander across the scene as if it were a photograph. The eyes slide along the fishing rod until they notice the tip is bent at a slight angle. A parabola of a bite. And yet, there seems to be no activity below, in the water; no ripples appear. The rod is still, time passes, and what at first looked like the beginning of an action reveals itself as a condition: the angle of the rod is simply its natural state. A behavior usually ruled by physical and social laws turns into a permanent tension. It’s one of those films that don’t need the liquid effect over the image with harp sounds to announce that a memory has begun or that what we saw until then was just a dream. No spell is broken because there is no spell. The moment/tension/miracle compresses into a single detail, like someone whistling and, without realizing, zipping up a song. This isolated element floating two meters off the ground seems free in its self-determination; there is no I activating an object, but rather an act acting upon itself. I think about the flight of flies. I wonder if it is poetic or if it’s shaped by some adaptive function. If those turns and behaviors belong only to a complex dance, or if they’re also the reflections of a nearby, impoverished future. If stacked buffet baskets work like timelines or like tedious punk lyrics. If the equation they follow is housed inside the artist’s brain or outside the organism, encrypted in something like an external hard drive where we put the scraps we despise after lunch but, come nighttime, when the fridge is empty, suddenly don’t seem thaaaat bad.

Tomas Maglione
Big Sur Gallery
March 2014

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