For Status Quo we selected prayers, headlines, titles, and phrases from the worlds most important newspapers, with the intention of generating consciousness about “the state of the actual moment”: Status Quo. These prayers become, as is expressed in the word “prayers”, in moments of devotion and in moments of meditation and contemplation, part of the sea of information that we are faced with today. The pillow is the support that articulates the installation, as much as in the formal and material sense as in its concept in relation to the work it contains. In the interior of this house of dreams, built by hundreds of pillows, printed with images of our united hands in a position of offering, the paper shredder incessantly destroys and crushes our actual reality; a female hand, rescues and redeems certain phrases and titles from diverse papers, creating a new narrative – our own narrative about the state of the actual moment: Status Quo. United by safety pins, filled with shredded newspaper, and hung by an imposed rigid structure, these pillows that conform and sustain the work, allow the contemplation of a scene from varying points of view. We can also see the holes and stitching that mark their construction and their links to the outside world.
This installation reunites diverse mediums: photo, text, sculpture, sound and video – it is multidisciplinary. Together with an essentially visual procedure we began to introduce, from the beginning, the verbal language, the oral word or the written text – for our projects is a way of conceptualizing, de-conceptualizing and re-conceptualizing the inexhaustible sources of language disposable from our own message. In this particular work, the extractions of newspapers are affected by subjective interpretational factors of media information and question the objectivity of journalism. These penetrating repertoires full of connotations referring to today’s themes reflect on the politics of subjectivity and respond to the need of emptying the models of their acquired meanings, and present them as open structures or spaces with the possibility of being recreated once again.
In Status Quo; we use a technique of deconstruction that tends to reveal symbolic and political meaning, as well as the religious and social meaning that is codified in the mass media, creating “archetypes of social spaces” – cemeteries, houses, walls, churches, monuments – that play together with the media, a key role in the stimulation and diffusion of ideologies. Status Quo produces a dreamlike sanctuary of power. This work constitutes an object of thought and seduction, of dreams and realities of past times and future ones. It seeks to give art a cognitive and critical dimension. It awakens the conscience and stimulates our sense of justice and our critical spirit; an art that alerts, that awakens our conscience.