Opening February 18, 6-8pm
Gallery hours: Saturday and Sunday, 12-6pm

In this video, Cristóbal Gracia digs into futurist mythologies to offer a critical characterization of the identity drive: a product? an artifice? a ritual of seduction? Perhaps, simply, a speculative dance to captivate the gaze of the great Other.

En esta pieza de video, Cristóbal Gracia excava en mitologías futuristas para ofrecer una caracterización crítica de la pulsión identitaria: ¿un producto? ¿un artificio? ¿un ritual de seducción? Quizás, simplemente, una danza especulativa para cautivar la mirada del gran Otrx.

At the beginning of this century, a unique spectacle took place at the Palladium club in the port of Acapulco. A ritual that brought together visitors from the upper middle classes of Mexico as well as spring breakers who, knowingly or not, had inherited the exotizing impulse of beatnik poetry. What they witnessed was a kind of postmodern black mass, where nostalgia for pre-Columbian grandeur and the certainty of a futuristic dystopia were intertwined. At the center of it all, a prehispanic warrior with silver skin holding a torch in his hand. His mouth repeated a dark litany, full of references to science fiction films, video games and comic books. With it he prepared his body for the frenzy that lit up the night with neon lights and strobes, merging with the decades of splendor of Acapulco, the tourist destination par excellence of the Mexican republic; a glory that already had its days numbered.

In this video installation, Cristóbal Gracia brings back the mythical show of the Azteca de Plata (Silver Aztec) to offer a critical characterization of the identity drive. First, by showing the laborious protocols of prior preparation and subsequent cleaning, it is possible to see the degree of artificiality and effort required to embody a construction of this type. As a result, what is obtained is an ideal, both physical and political, impossible to sustain in a prolonged manner: the existence of this Promethean being is ephemeral by definition. On the other hand, by recreating this spectacle on at least three levels—on camera, replicated by one of the multiple imitators of the original show and with the presence of the action figure inspired by it—Gracia points out the impossibility of keeping intact the narratives that seek to define human groups; each iteration generates difference, nothing remains identical to itself.

Let’s be clear: this appeal to the founding myths of Mexican identity was detonated to enrich the leisure of external gazes to this tale. And perhaps the greatest confrontation of this installation takes place thanks to the silence and solitude that surround the warriors because, in their absence, the gaze of the Other takes on all its weight. What remains, then, of this founding narrative when the bodies that wear themselves out to embody it do so for external enjoyment: a product? a caricature? an artifice? a toy? a ritual of seduction?

Finally, Gracia also draws our attention to the pictorial and performative gestures involved in the production and deployment of this speculative dance. In doing so, he reminds us of the role that art history has played in the construction of identity narratives of nation-states in the West. But, above all, he accurately points to the prominence that identity affirmation has in current political art. Thus, Gracia neither condemns nor celebrates. On the contrary, in the same way as happened during those nights in Acapulco, he invites us to dance a silent dance with that demon that is all identity.

Gustavo A. Cruz Cerna