Lagunas

We are constantly altering our memories
so that the past won't conflict with the present.

Lagunas is a fictional & interactive installation, a triptych between memory, death and water. Pre-historic landscapes call death and tell the story of a death, a death in the water; but also the death of water in planet Earth.

Lagunas Includes 3 video screens, 3 mirrors and 3 water tabs. On top of each screen there's a one-way mirror. When the spectators approach the screens they see their image reflected on the mirrors. If the water tabs are rotated, video and sound are activated; the tabs are used all along the experience as triggers & controllers for the interactive scenario of the installation.

The water tabs aim to make a direct link between the way we consume and the effects that our daily consumption have over the ecosystem. Opening the water tabs relates the spectator directly with its own water daily habits, bringing an edge on how as consumers we have the ability to control and establish the way we affect in a large scale the environment of the planet. It aims to question our consumption practices, daily life behaviours and our responsibility both from a personal point of view, to a larger political one.

Lagunas is dark, still and somber. Silent landscapes of stagnant water; dying fish; the lake water is gloomy, the water is thick, algae and mud overshadow the depths. Beneath the surface a man lies too far-gone. He's dying underwater.

Suddenly exterior magnetic forces start attracting archaic rocks from beneath the water depths. The rocks lift over and over, to the surface and far beyond the airs. Drilling machines emerge in the landscape: twisting, turning, cliffing in between the mountains. The drilling machines intercept the levitating rocks, destroying the rocks and turning them back to smaller pieces of stone that prominently after destruction fall back into the water. The man's abandoned body starts receiving the impacts of the rocks and finally wakes up trying to safe his life. In the struggle the man looses consciousness and the cycle starts again: Drowning is imminent, the man gives death without a fight, accepts fate without struggle and delivers to oblivion.

The lakes and mountain landscapes have been filmed in Colombia, in "Chingaza Natural National Park", a natural reserve located in the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes, in the northeast of Bogota. The elevation of the mountains surrounding the natural glacial lakes ranges from 800 to 4,020 meters.

http://www.ulara.org