ANTONIO LABELLA
.
ODYSSEYESIDO
I
I
Tell me, Musa, the story of the man of many paths, who wandered long after the sacred Troy ravaged; he saw many cities of men and knew their disposition, and pain suffered untoldly at sea trying to ensure the life and return of his companions.
But he did not manage to save them, with much love for it, because victims of his own folly succumbed, crazy! of Hyperion Helios the cows ate, and at that point the day of return ended for them. Goddess, daughter of Zeus, also to us, tell us a passage of these events.
Odyssey, Canto I.
The work Odiseaesido is an experimental rereading of the classic La Odisea by the artists Antonio Labella and Sinclair Castro. The construction of this piece has been based on selecting the first and last song of the Odyssey in Spanish, creating groups by stanzas that have subsequently been inserted in the YouTube search engine. From each first video that has appeared in the search, the first minutes have been extracted, and a group of video fragments has been created for each verse of the song. All these fragments have been added into a total film that exposes the rewriting of this classic. For the visualization of the experimental piece, the video was reproduced on a screen next to another screen that projects song number one of The Odyssey in a linear manner and with a typography that follows an aesthetic of the old MsDos (green letters with background White). During the visualization, the spectator was invited to participate in the construction of the work because a tablet had been prepared to produce a rhythm that controls the visualization of the frames. Each experience was a re-reading of the Odyssey.
The great stories of the past such as Mahabharata or The Odyssey, lack a specific author, are added to the production of a discursive element because it has been a compilation of knowledge, Homer in this case. Some artists have worked on this concept, such as the works of Gérard Collin-Thiébaut that he copied in three thick notebooks "The Sentimental Education" of Flaubert or the painter Sherrie Levine that he directly took from works by other authors. Authorship, as we know it, derives from social constructions and comes into direct conflict with the current era characterized by the ease of creating reproductions. The new possibilities offered by the network to produce appropriations of audiovisual material that in turn serve to generate new discourses, has multiplied by thousands new ways of communicating and creation starting from the blank canvas is losing strength in favor of an ecology of the image. The contemporary author can begin a discourse simply by recomposing the debris of the image society, from its visual garbage, from the shadows generated by excess, delirious images are projected that say a lot about ourselves.