Érase una vez el fin | Vicente Prieto Gaggero: La Embajada | Madrid

An experiment: watch David Cronenberg's entire filmography in a 24-hour marathon. You may survive, just as the characters in his films resist mutations, accidents, metamorphoses and viruses. It will be harder to get through the next day. Domestic life will become strange. You will feel watched in your house, and your comfort zone - your home - will now be a living, pulsating thing. The oven will sprout tits and a penis, the glasses will sprout teeth, and the shower will sprout tentacles. Eventually, you will become part of the walls, the furniture, the ceiling and the floor.

 

The fetishes of the new normality rest on a structure reminiscent of a precarious house, from which the old strangeness emerges, disturbingly. A coffee pot, a pair of Crocs, a fence, have been invaded by a virus that has caused mutations and cracked tumours that threaten to explode like an alien egg.

 

A camera and a dog robot have spikes that add a new power to that of surveillance: the power to punish. Pills have grown human appendages like feet and ears, like the Vacanti mouse. The pharmaceutical industry as a watchdog and guardian of the inside of our bodies.

 

All pieces with a chrome patina, like the Mechanical Animals' Marilyn Manson, the record whose vinyl was a pill with the word "coma" written on it. Cyberpunk pottery halfway between the imagery of Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) and Benvenuto Cellini's Francis I of France pepper shaker. Cyberpunk pottery made by a Latin American in Spain.

 

In his notes, Prieto Gaggero paraphrases Donna Haraway: "The cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden, is not made of clay and cannot dream of returning to dust". The end of history is just another beginning.

 

Strictly speaking, a thigh tile is still an exoskeleton. It is made in the shape of the worker's leg. The roof of a house would be made up of individualised objects, of curved boards made in the pattern of a human body. Roof tiles built in a chain, following the Fordist logic in which the worker becomes a machine. This idea is repeated in another piece in the exhibition: the foot chained to a brick with the DHL logo and the symbol of the messenger god, which establishes a reading with the exploitation of the delivery riders, underpaid human machines in today's Madrid.

 

From this tile, a surveillance camera "sprouts," which, joined in a circle to other counterparts, transforms the installation into an allegory of the house as a panopticon. There is resistance to surveillance, as evidenced by the semi-chrome roof tiles scattered inside and outside this space. They are fossils of a bygone civilisation. Vicente Prieto Gaggero is the one who remembers the past world through his works, using the only material available to him in the future: clay.