you are the magnet and I am the metal (slowly magnitizdat)
audio installation, collages, digital prints, 2018/19
“You, you are the magnet and I am the metal
I am getting closer and making a plan
Simply thinking about it makes my heart race (oh yeah)”
– Despacito, Luis Fonsi
you are the magnet and I am the metal (slowly magnitizdat) is a project looking at forms of repetition as a method of learning and disseminating information, and the hurdles that this crosses in terms of history and decay of knowledge.
Originally presented as an exhibition at c3 Art Space, Melbourne, in 2018, you are the magnet and I am the metal (slowly magnitizdat) included a series of mixed-media collages, an exhibition essay in the form of correspondence from Gracia Haby, and a looped and increasingly tape-degraded audio installation of me repeatedly singing the chorus of Despacito.
This audio was a mimicking of a Magnitizdat machine - a form of duplication used during the Chilean dictatorship and USSR to copy and distribute music recordings to circumvent censorship. These recordings were often popular music or protest songs. Juxtaposed to this is my memorization and rendition of the recent pop song Despacito – a Latino-English crossover hit that has become the most streamed song of all time and the first music video to reach over 4 billion views on YouTube, easily accessed and reproduced via the internet.
The dual text within the collages comes from the spanishdict.com translation guide for Despacito, which lays out the translation alongside cultural insights and the highlighting of specific uses of the words in context. The visual patterns come from drawings I made based on imagery in the video clip. While the works in the original exhibition are hand cut and pasted (with different thicknesses from the layers, misalignments, and some shifting over time), similar works have continued as digital prints - now living easily in both the online space, and available as open editions.
Accompanying these works was audio of looped and increasingly tape-degraded singing of the chorus of 'Despacito'.
I need to dance with you today (DY)
audio, 30min
installation images: Aaron Christopher Rees