2010

Eight–channel video installation - A cube with 4 synchronized turning projections and 4 adapted travel–chests each containing one puppet and a video monitor presenting its respective animation

Loop: 4 channels 07’ and 4 travel chests 04’52” | Variable dimensions

From their fragmented memories as children growing up in front of a TV set, like many of their generation, Dias & Riedweg conceived this work from images collected exclusively from the web that, together, form a panorama of the political and geographic history of the world from the Cold War to Global Warming.

The installation is structured by four large concentric rear-projections done from the interior of a huge cube and four used travel trunks, each containing a puppet of an important figure of our political history and its respective video animated by the Rio puppeteer Marco Nogueira. Four key figures from the Cold War era whose actions contributed directly or indirectly to Global Warming today were chosen: Che Guevara, Mao Tse-Tung, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.

Floating coloured circles resembling ephemeral soap bubbles present archival images of our history collected from the web while puppets present the crucial historical discourses of this period, in a game that indicates how manipulated and manipulative the facts that make up our history may have been.

Here, some of the most significant historical facts are represented by the hands of an invisible puppet master and blend with images from commercials and TV series, eventually growing to such proportions on the installation screens that they simply burst and disappear like soap bubbles. The question remains, therefore, whether some of the key figures in the story could also be manipulated, who or what makes the story?