| Miguel
Angel Rios
by Gabriela Rangel and Miguel Angel Rios
Los Niņos Brotan de Noche (The Children that
Spring out at Night) not only reproduces the vertigo of hallucinogenic experiences but,
through its reconstitution, tries to destabilize, spatially and conceptually, the
Cartesian certainties of the context created by the White Cube. If every space translates
the will of its conceiver and producer, then the museum space is historically a rational
space, a space of control, a construct for the development of
distinctions and qualifications that the mind establishes in relation to the objects that
are presented there. Rios offers instead a mythical space, one of "veladuras"
(veils) and opacities, where certainties have been replaced by a psychic (dis)order where
every desire of control is suspended by the trip the observer is invited to take. Whoever
enters and walks through the twilight of this lethargic space where nothing is predictable
is confronted with two types of coexisting experiences: a visual and an acoustic one.
Image and sound are usually combined and thought of as a whole, especially in film. In
this case, both are used to create a perceptual narrative dislocation. In addition to
these differentiated boundaries, Rios has placed a "hut" inside the space, in an
oblique manner, adding a diagonal axis within the dark rectangle of the room. The video
monitor, installed in the window of the "hut," does not expose topical images of
the shaman Gudelia, who guides Rios in his hallucinogenic trip, but instead, the monitor
mirrors the eloquent opacity of the space itself. The sound dispersed throughout the space
presents a hidden dialogue where the shaman takes artists and companions to the depths of
their psyches. The intention of the obscure narrative strategy of these artifacts is not
to translate the hallucinogenic visions of the ritual performed in Huatla de Jimenez in
Oaxaca (Mexico): the use of space does not satisfy the curiosity of the western spectator.
Aware of the essentialist and exotic effects of the psychedelic voyages, Rios limits
himself to spatially and perceptually transcribing some of the fundamental aspects of the
language of the shamanic trip. He evokes the rhythm of the schizophrenic temporality and
the codes of the initiated. Los Niņos Brotan de Noche literally means
"mushrooms that spring out," that is, bodies that grow out of the colonized
earth to initiate a search for resistance linked to a kind of knowledge that goes beyond
the act of looking at objects and categorizing realities.
Gabriela Rangel is a Venezuelan filmmaker, writer and
curator. She is the recipient of the Cisneros Fellowship at the Center for Curatorial
Studies at Bard College, New York. |
