Campeonato en Guadalajara

2015 Travesía Cuatro, Guadalajara, Mexico.

Is it possible to create a reinterpretation of history that ignores the impulse to be consistent with real facts? Even though the collaboration between Marcel Dzama and Eduardo Sarabia does not attempt to answer this question, it brings up a series of involuntary answers that evidence an alternative approach. Firstly, it manifests a refusal to understand the past in terms of victories and failures, which enables the artists to distance themselves from the univocal tale, legitimized as true, in order to inquire into the peripheral events, ignored and disqualified by historians, assuming the dynamic and unresolved potential of history.

Campeonato de Guadalajara is the denial of a historical narrative composed by as assortment of montionless facts, it is the reanimation of what is considered to be inert. It is the remembrance of a chess tournament in Nice, for which Marcel Duchamp designed a poster and, simultaneously, it is a fragmented interpretation of the Florentine Codex, employing both artists’ visual languages. It is a sequence of secret rites performed by ballet companies gathering hooded terrorists and anthropomorphized animals, using costumes designed by Oskar Schlemmer and Francis Picabia. This collaboration is not a translation exercise; it does not seek to reach a consensus to establish a code that surpasses the contextual differences between the artists. Instead, it opts for a simultaneous dialogue, with interferences and interruptions.

Sarabia seeks to counteract the mythological constructs that operate behind the iconography associated with illegal drug trade in Mexico by transforming it into merchandise that may look like souvenirs from Mexican aesthetics. The popular imagery that usually inhabits these crafts is replaced by the reality of mass media that has installed itself at the level of everyday life. Meanwhile, Dzama has created an entire cast of characters that inhabits his work, they are forced to depict situations that could be the product of an infantile mind speculating about the nature of violence: despite being an explicit exploration of the macabre, a naïve and innocent character prevails. The represented events reject any sort of narrative coherence, creating vignettes consisting of paused and suspended ecstatic moments, making the viewer feel as if they were interrupting a pagan celebration.

Both artists aim to reconcile apparently contradictory worlds: the popular and recognizable with the occult and incomprehensible. The ways in which they manifest the contradictions between these two dimensions reveals a fracture of the archetypal understanding of the world. Sarabia accentuates this discordance by means of normalizing reality in form of merchandise, while Dzama resorts to the emulation of euphoric, violent, and sexual frenzy.

© Eduardo Sarabia 2019

Campeonato en Guadalajara

2015 Travesía Cuatro, Guadalajara, Mexico.

Is it possible to create a reinterpretation of history that ignores the impulse to be consistent with real facts? Even though the collaboration between Marcel Dzama and Eduardo Sarabia does not attempt to answer this question, it brings up a series of involuntary answers that evidence an alternative approach. Firstly, it manifests a refusal to understand the past in terms of victories and failures, which enables the artists to distance themselves from the univocal tale, legitimized as true, in order to inquire into the peripheral events, ignored and disqualified by historians, assuming the dynamic and unresolved potential of history.

Campeonato de Guadalajara is the denial of a historical narrative composed by as assortment of montionless facts, it is the reanimation of what is considered to be inert. It is the remembrance of a chess tournament in Nice, for which Marcel Duchamp designed a poster and, simultaneously, it is a fragmented interpretation of the Florentine Codex, employing both artists’ visual languages. It is a sequence of secret rites performed by ballet companies gathering hooded terrorists and anthropomorphized animals, using costumes designed by Oskar Schlemmer and Francis Picabia. This collaboration is not a translation exercise; it does not seek to reach a consensus to establish a code that surpasses the contextual differences between the artists. Instead, it opts for a simultaneous dialogue, with interferences and interruptions.

Sarabia seeks to counteract the mythological constructs that operate behind the iconography associated with illegal drug trade in Mexico by transforming it into merchandise that may look like souvenirs from Mexican aesthetics. The popular imagery that usually inhabits these crafts is replaced by the reality of mass media that has installed itself at the level of everyday life. Meanwhile, Dzama has created an entire cast of characters that inhabits his work, they are forced to depict situations that could be the product of an infantile mind speculating about the nature of violence: despite being an explicit exploration of the macabre, a naïve and innocent character prevails. The represented events reject any sort of narrative coherence, creating vignettes consisting of paused and suspended ecstatic moments, making the viewer feel as if they were interrupting a pagan celebration.

Both artists aim to reconcile apparently contradictory worlds: the popular and recognizable with the occult and incomprehensible. The ways in which they manifest the contradictions between these two dimensions reveals a fracture of the archetypal understanding of the world. Sarabia accentuates this discordance by means of normalizing reality in form of merchandise, while Dzama resorts to the emulation of euphoric, violent, and sexual frenzy.