VARGAS
Totentanz
Installation
2025
After our disappearance, all technologies will become vintage. The cultural differences that once granted a particular status to technical devices like analog cameras, Super 8 film recorders, mechanical typewriters, printed books and fanzines, and, of course, vinyl records and turntables, will lose their distinct aura and be equated with CDs, cell phones, collections of music files in 128-bit mp3 format, digital photo libraries in jpg, and all contemporary manifestations of multifunctional objects and the archives produced with them will become equally precious and, at the same time, utterly useless. Without human presence on Earth, all our artifacts and products of culture will serve new purposes and will be slowly, inexorably, absorbed by the Earth with total indifference or with unextinguishable passion. Our homes will become refuges for bears, raccoons, rats, cockroaches, birds, various reptiles, ferns, lichens, mosses, and weeds. Our libraries will be the perforated menu of silverfish (Lepisma saccharina) and countless molds and mites; from our urban sewage and drainage systems, beautiful bouquets of nettles, dandelions, mimosas, and many other plants will sprout, serving innumerable species and restoring the trophic chain broken by the hegemonic pretense of human domination over the planet. Slowly, each and every one of the devices that today allow us to see images, consolidate our memories, and enjoy the sound of infinite music from various eras will be corroded by rust, devoured by insects that feed on cable plastic, nested by bees, petrified by the dust that seeps through their cracks, and ultimately neutralized forever.
Yet plastic will endure, at least for another millennium. A millennium that will give the planet the chance to be visited by other civilizations, or to witness the sudden cognitive leap of some primates, octopuses, or marine mammals who might find a way to make those black polyvinyl chloride records play. In the meantime, the world will sound on its own, creating pieces of which we will not be witnesses, but a planetary music will finally have the time and space to grow and weave itself into threads of complexity and subtlety: the howl of a wolf that makes the birds trill, the eagles scream, and the owls hoot; dogs will howl, cats will hiss stealthily, and crickets will crackle with power on nights alongside the multifarious croaks of frogs and the sibilate of snakes. The world, in our silence, will perform the epic opera of its own transience.
In a small corner of the world, displayed in the showcase of a record factory, the musicless turntables of Daniela Vargas Victoria will continue to play at regular intervals, producing the mechanical sound of their own operation, like bodies that keep breathing while waiting for something, like dead sunflowers that do not give up trying to chase the sun as they await the time to be swallowed by the undergrowth. There, amplified by mirrors that project them into infinity, they will resonate faintly, spinning in the serenity of their confinement, which is, at the same time, a form of endless projection and an invocation to what is always beyond. The triad of mother, daughter, and spirit represents the possibility of blossoming of that which keeps turning, even in captivity, even amid the murmur of a mechanism enslaved by times programmed by a switch, even if its false flowering of melted plastic seems to continue marking the division that the hegemony of the colonial narrative forced into truth, perpetuating the idea that one thing is physis and another techné, that nature and culture are opposed, that the savage lives off what is given by the earth while the cultured man forces the earth to yield what is demanded of it. Such a division is, of course, false, perverse, and strategic for perpetuating the colonial systems of exploitation that have brought human life on the planet to face the imminent mirror of extinction. Inhabiting that ambiguity, like a spell, this magical device keeps spinning rhythmically, knowing that, sooner or later, it will be engulfed by flames, as often happens to witches and their artifices. In the end, slowly, or suddenly, the system that sustains the rotating blossoming of those three PVC flowers will stop, rust, or be ravaged by natural forces, but for as long as it is able, it will sustain the circular dance of its life, fed by electric current, and will turn silently until it is consumed by fire in this night of the end of our times.
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Víctor Albarracín llanos
