MELANIE SMITH

FORDLANDIA

Fordlandia is a small settlement on the River Tapajos in the Brazilian part of the Amazon, where Henry Ford set up a rubber industry in the 1920's. Mainly due to the resistance of nature the project failed and was abandoned some twenty years later. The film "Fordlandia" is a voyage of (de)colonization whereby the drifts and detours of modernity in uncertain places are highlighted, turning away from whatever their historical imaginaries were. The tensions between industrial and natural landscape are leveled off in a certain horizontality of hierarchies between form and content, and at the same time the animal resignifies possibilities the community of the living.

MARIA ELENA

Maria Elena is a small mining town in the Atacama desert, founded in the 1920’s and developed by the Guggenheim’s to produce saltpetre, used for both fertilizers and explosives. The film explores an ongoing interest in the application and obsolescence of industrial modernity. It also traces the impact of the British in the region, who were heavily involved in the extraction processes of nitrates incorporating it into a satellite of an economic global system. The narrative threads a tale of contradicting montage, whereby crystals become stars, a horse’s ear a mountain and enormous beds of nitrate appear as informel abstract paintings, exposing the geological terror of the past and future.

FAKE AND FARCE: BACKDROPS FOR SEVEN SCENES

Fake and Farce: Backdrops for seven scenes has its origins in the performative piece developed for La Tallera during the Summer of 2017 based on painting by Hyeronimus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder. This multi-faceted piece created spatially complex theatrical perspectives that brought the back stage to the front whilst turning the workplace into a continuous exhibit. Fake and Farce unfolds upon the results of those scenes thus adding an extra level of interpretation that sets forth the tension between the construction of time in what is properly pictorial and in the moving image. The whole exhibition is a kind of background while the recorded images of the action that took place in La Tallera have become themselves a video-installation. The paintings seem to build and destroy the pictorial plane in a single move, hiding themselves through the loopholes of the videos. The paintings organize, aesthetically, a loss of meaning. It is from these spaces of indetermination that questions arise and connect the medieval imaginary with the contemporary world: How is political correctness detaching us from desire, joy, irrationality and disorder? How can the stasis of painting be understood as a kind of movement where lack of action, time and form take on another meaning?

ABANDONED BODIES AND UNCERTAIN FUTURES

This series recomposes stock images to make a visual essay of misaligned elements. The paintings are abstract representations of empty truncated bodies, interspersed with digital graphs, blips and networks from no specific territory, a proximate reminder of unintelligible disconnection with ourselves.

XILITLA: DISMANTLED 1

Las Pozas, a seductive and decadent setting for nature’s exuberance in Mexican landscape, is the motive behind Xilitla: Dismantled 1. This film, shot in 35mm, calls into question the imaginary limits between modern and contemporary art practices. The surreal construction mechanisms that Edward James used to build his semitropical enclave are disassembled. By constructing it through visual and audio distancing from the natural landscape, Smith disassembles the modern gaze, which turns the exotic landscape into a screen and an image whereupon its own desire is projected.