Opening 2002 - Galería Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid, Spain. Duration: 45min Written and Directed: La Ribot. Corps-opérateur: La Ribot. Technical Direction and Director of Photography: Daniel Demont. Assistant to Demont and Sound Design: Nelson Enohata. Sound Technician: Richard Rudnicki. Assistant to La Ribot: Christianne Toledo. Production Manager: Eduardo Bonito and Michel Quéré. Administration: Daisy Heath. Technical Production: Steve Wald. Produced by La Ribot-36 Gazelles, London, with the support of London Arts. An Artsadmin associated project. Collections ARTIUM - Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; MUSAC- Castilla y León, Spain; FRAC Lorraine - Metz, France.
Video installation
Recycling elements from all thirty-four Distinguished Pieces, 1993-2000, the gallery installation Despliegue forms a kind of conclusion to that major project. It’s also an important starting point: featuring a performance filmed in a single take using a hand-held camera, it introduces a tactic that La Ribot has explored extensively in later works.
Despliegue shows the artist roaming a small area of studio space, “painting” the floor with the diverse items that star in the Distinguished Pieces. The peppermint-green frilly dress from Oh! Compositione, 1997, appears, followed by the scarlet trappings of Another Bloody Mary, 2000. A mirror reflecting the studio ceiling, and flat-screen monitors replaying the video Pa amb tomàquet, 2000, are placed on the floor, adding further complexities to the multi-coloured composition’s spatial properties. As she constructs her neo-baroque “tableau” La Ribot recapitulates the Distinguished Pieces’ key gestures, poses and vocalisations.
The performance was filmed continuously from start to finish using two cameras, one fixed on the ceiling about five metres over the floor and one hand-held by the performer. In installation, the overhead shot is projected onto the gallery floor and the hand-held footage is screened on a nearby monitor. The viewer’s attention is split between a bird’s-eye view that offers lavishly coloured painterly effects, and a very different perspective that the artist has likened to the “eyes of the body”. Tilting, swerving and ignoring gravity, this viewpoint sometimes echoes the camera-handler’s gaze (looking at the book she’s reading, for instance) while at other times it objectifies her body, intruding into its “defensible space” with carnivalesque disrespect.
Despliegue extracts a sumptuous, bizarre grandeur and visual pleasure from an eclectic selection of everyday objects and an eccentric repertoire of physical actions. Compressing nearly ten years’ experimentation across the borders of dance, performance art and gallery installation into a forty-five-minute cycle, it revels in fragmentation, disorientation and destabilisation, not least at the level of the artist’s own oeuvre.