El Procer

Films and videos

Toutes les versions de cet article : [English] [Español] [français]

“The Procer” is a video loop made from a photograph found in New York, USA, and manipulated digitally in a series of photogram’s to conform the video

This video is part of a strategy taken by Lastreto, after thirty years in exile in New York, trying to understand the new reality after his return to the country. The figure of El Procer is the excuse to open questions about the new reality. This is not any Hero in particular, and for that reason is all Heros.

The Hero go from one pedestal to another in a infinite loop. Is the spectator ho must decided the motives of the Hero actions. Is he running away from one place to another ? Or is he looking for the right pedestal-place for him ?

The video happens in three layers. In the background, different landscapes appeared that not only speaks about different places of the world. They also signal different cultures and ideologies. We can see the Trojan Arc, the Tatlin Tower, a copy made in Paris, France, a monument from de extinct RDA, the Atom from the World Fair in Brussels, Belgium and the remains of a huge factory destroyed by a earth quake in China, etc.

In the middle ground occurs the trajectory of the Hero going from one pedestal to the next. Same off this are real, like the pedestal of the monument to José Gervasio Artigas, the hero of Uruguay, in the Plaza Independencia, in the center Montevideo, the capital. Others are invented like the small brick column or re signified as the case with the tomb of the Pope Julius II by Michel Angel. They dialoged between them and with the absurd location in which appeared.

In the foreground little characters appeared taken from the work of Edward Muybridge (England, 1830). They play two roles in the video. The first as comment to the passage of the Procer for the location. For instance, every time that the Procer crosses Artigas’s pedestal a young lady tosses a bucket of water. This is a ritual from the Caribbean area to “clean” the house of bad spirits. The second comment about the technology used to made the video. The “imperfect” animation recall the work of Muylbridge, his studies about movement. Also speaks about the possibilities of making Art with adverse technological conditions.

Note :

The music selected for the video is the march of the “Revolución Libertadora” from Argentina, 1955, from the original recording taken in the “Convento de La Merced” the night before of the starting of that revolution which toppled Gral. Perón out of power. The singing is accompanied only by the fist of the officials pounding the tables. This ridom do not follow the action of the video exactly, and this creates a tension between what you hear and what you see. Will the Procer arrive to the next pedestal or not ? The lyric in the march are interested also for their grandiose emptiness of sense.

The march is available : http://www.lalibertadora.org/hist-doc-intro.html