Nouvelle Laurentine / Hors les Murs manifestations de la Maison Laurentine

Idea and realization : Alberto Lastreto
Sound design : Alberto Lastreto
Time : 11’ 56’’

The video “Escudo Cabildo” is named after the shield hung in the colonial City Hall of Montevideo, Uruguay. This particular national emblem, made at the end of the 19th century, attracted my attention for the quality of its manufacture, its exquisite water gilding and excellent polychrome wood carving. It spoke to me of an earlier era in Uruguay, a time in which the country was forming its own concepts of nationality and the republic. The shield further provoked me to raise the question of what happened to those concepts relative to the current reality of rampant globalization.

The four concepts that appear in the shield are : “Justice”, “Force”, “Prosperity” and “Liberty”. The video pretends to open a space to question and explain them, only using videos taken from the Internet. One by one, each quadrant is substitute by this videos.

The concepts embedded in the shield are attacked by the concept on this videos. The local are attack by the global, and the hole architecture of a way of though start to tremble.

Sound :