CIRCUIT VIII

In terms of worthlessness, nothing is more useless than life itself. You’re born to die, and then you lose all material wealth accrued, despite the fact that the social structures in which humans organise themselves are monetary and material driven.

Beliefs, reasoning, thinking, nothing saves you from the uncertainty that we all face, death. Therefore why follow estab- lished norms, but instead choose the path that really fulfills human beings, something not universal or widely followed, but something, different for each one of us. Life is an art, and, as art, it needs to be experienced and realised.

There exist marked trails, directing signs, fences, closed areas that serve as political, economic, religious, or education- al nexus, that guide us along the different realities, traced but not discussed, to be followed by the majority, not looking to the side, not hearing other possibilities, or follow other paths or shortcuts more enriching on the individual level. These useful roads, allow us to negotiate closed environments, which eventually become useless mice tracks from which there is no escape. There will always be the option to dig a hole, to escape, only your instilled fear of the so-called “useless”, which in the end is more useful than the so-called “useful”, that would allow you to contemplate the swarm of closed circuits that more than unite, separate.

The media, research papers, lobbies, religions; they all focus on a single point of view, often economic, creating those mouse-traps that signal the difference between “good” or “bad”. Constant noise that creates and implements individual desires on a massive scale, part of a strategy of mind control and overall “domestication” that leads to mass indifference in an easily manipulated universal reality. The education system creates circuits that grow stronger as we advance in our social integration, only they crumble when you see through them, as you become aware that there will be those who will grow richer as certain beliefs are inculcated on the rest.

Ana Devora’s piece creates an installation consisting of a circuit viewed from above, which in turn includes a series of circuits or chips painted on canvas. At the centre of this installation there sits a sculpture shaped like a human head on a rectangular pedestal, with two holes where two screens project, in turn, channels being tuned, and extracts from “Puppets” (another of my projects whose main theme is early indoctrination through the education system). The human head, which appears asleep, is wearing headsets emitting a sound that does not allow them to hear the outside world.

The different interconnected circuits encounter interferences in their way, more TVs out of tune, more noise, connected in turn to desires or lifestyles followed by the masses. Further on, visitors are presented with some works on canvas, and a diagram of the room from above.