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Mika Rottenberg: people and goods, the paradox of free circulation inside a video-installation

The imagery of Mika Rottenberg – who lives and works in New York, but was born in Buenos Aires of Polish parentage and grew up in Israel before moving to the States in the late nineties – draws ideas and suggestions from the false myths provided by a young country such as the United States where they grow stronger and more disruptive everyday. As proof of this concept we can take her choice to “aestheticize” the featurless space of shops in her work Cosmic Generator or the idea to portray characters with exuberant physical features, such as body builders (in Tropical Breeze, 2004 and in Fried Sweat, 2008), women suffering from obesity (Dough, 2006; Squeeze, 2010) or with unusually long hair (like in her 2008 video installation Cheese, which tells the true story of the seven Sutherland sisters in Lockport, New York, who had hair almost 11 meters long. They grew up in a farm at the end of the 19th century and became wealthy selling their miracle product, a lotion for hair growth which was later discovered to be just a mixture of alcohol, rainwater and food colouring). The artist finds these subjects interesting because of their ability to build a connection with the space surrounding them even though the relationship could initially have been problematic. Rottenberg’s artistic research overrides clichés, social commentary and obsession with the material qualities of bodies and surfaces, even though the latter is always present in her works and she is fascinated by the properties of matter to the point of constructing around it actual domestic ecosystems as it is in the case of the old air-conditioning unit in the installation Tsss Tsss Tsss (2014). She focuses to explore in depth the relationship between space and distance, between micro and macro, between surreal and the ordinary. She coins the expression “social surrealism” in order to identify a reality which is “stranger than anything she felt she could create herself”.

In the video installation “Cosmic Generator” (2017), currently on display at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk as part of the “7x Space x Time” exhibition, she concentrates her interest on what she defines the «collapse of distance» putting together the emotions she felt entering shops in China which were overloaded with goods to the point of ingesting their owners, with the ones experienced while crossing the border between United States and Mexico, focusing on the relationship between the twin cities Calexico and Mexicali. Rottenberg succeeds in building a grotesque representation made of complex parts which combined suggest from the very beginning the idea of a globalized space as a non existent entity where one can find absent-minded human beings. We can see men dressed as tacos going through underground tunnels, depressing glimpses of silent mexican cities watching over the border wall, chinese shop keepers sleeping in front of a computer or motionless in a state of alienation, within the walls of their stores full of toys, hovels drenching in a multi-coloured chaos, mexican women taking the lid off mysterious pans on the sides of the streets. In Cosmic Generator images revolve around themselves and constantly go back and forth without a true beginning nor a true end; the underlying assumption is that we have a worrying surplus of goods which circulate freely around the globe ending up crashing it, and very narrow spaces like the underground tunnels not just dug but sculpted by illegal immigrants «like a giant earth work», demonstrating how many human beings don’t have the same freedom of circulation.

The artist wants to point out that during the four to five hours it took her to cross the border between Mexico and the USA, goods from China are able to arrive in Europe: the conflict between space and movement is inherent in this intercontinental jump, it’s a «collapse of distance» where boundaries disappear only in theory. However her vision is not political per se or, to be more precise it is political (Rottenberg herself for istance talks about a «spiritual kind of Marxism» in order to describe the genesis of her creative process and the way she shapes the microcosms in her video installations) but in a more subtle way, almost involuntarily. This can be sensed in the urban landscapes in Cosmic Generator laid bare in the squalid but at the same time festive way they appear and disappear. This is why art, in her opinion, «is always political in a way, and not, at the same time. Maybe it’s free from making clear statements. It’s more nuanced than a political statement». Implicitly we can also find the topic of the dematerialisation of feelings, of things, of relationships and communication, in the very fast virtual era. Painstaking attention and fascination for everyday objects and the reproduction of ordinary but poetic sounds, outline profiles and echoes which are trapped in spaces that can be lumbering or visceral and represent the effects of consumerism which suffering in silence, contradicts itself and feeds itself at the same time.

Furthermore there is a kind of confused wait for the decisive catastrophe which actually doesn’t come, or if it comes it’s a bizarre and witty paroxysm like the fog which makes every mexican disappear from California in the movie A day without a mexican by Sergio Arau. This collection of mental images resembles, in a way, the paintings of John Brosio, master of catastrophic scenarios which take by surprise men outside their offices, who, while still holding their briefcases, have to face hurricanes, gigantic crabs or chickens that came out of nowhere, like dinosaurs of a new era, there to threaten quiet and monotonous everyday life.

John Brosio, Fatigue 2, 2009

Mika Rottenberg works begin with her intuitions, her ability to communicate, during interviews, her thoughts and what’s in her mind. This enables her to discover the ultimate meaning of her visions, or better, of her concrete constructions which drive the listener towards her. Shops look like overground tunnels, which compress people’s room for manoeuvre, besides, the line which represents the border between California and Mexico (which is partially made with army surplus from the Gulf War) branches off in the underground in the galleries dug by the immigrants which rely on these narrow spaces for their desire for freedom.

Lorenza Zampa

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