Eli Cortiñas

Eli Cortiñas, 1979, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

I work by appropriating existing audiovisual material, reconstructing with it identities and narratives according to new scenarios, altering its DNA through techniques of "critical fabulation" (Saidiya Hartman) and "collective speculation" (Bouchra Khalili) and invoking the spirit of collective memory while re-signifying the images. For my video-essays and installations I make use of material that comes from cinema, newscasts, YouTube channels, TV series, press, social networks, advertisements, animation, and at the same time also from audiovisual material acquired from platforms that are dedicated to the production of generic images for commercial purposes. All this material becomes an amalgam that together with my own recordings and without establishing neither differences in their use, nor an order of values between the "original" material and the appropriate, openly show the sources of origin of the material itself. A very conscious gesture that forms the most fundamental turn within my artistic process, since it reveals the different devices, modalities of consumption and reception, quality and value of production, and the visual categories from which the different mass narratives operate. I am very interested in the dialectic between authenticity and representation within the often unsuccessful and violent discourses of identity and the dismantling of power asymmetries and the deceptive construction of subalternity and processes of otherness within Western audiovisual production. Electronic devices equipped with lenses to produce images and social networks brought with them a tremendously significant paradigm shift in terms of the creation, distribution and consumption of images, a techno-cultural-social shift on which I reflect in my work. Questioning the new creation and circulation of images that operates under the guise of a democratization of narratives - despite the fact that the power of dominant currents and aesthetics, especially in the digital sphere, remains in the hands of a few entities, extremely agile co-opting and capitalizing on any movement of contestation and resistance for commercial and/or ideological purposes. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find spaces that escape normativity, systems of control and monitoring of affect and surveillance capitalism. Édouard Glissant said "If we want to understand the world better, we have to tremble with it" But are those worlds that we apparently build as artists the worlds we will tremble with? Who trembles with the gated communities? Or the inmates of prisons? Or the concentration camps where migrants are locked up? Who trembles with the rivers, the oceans, the forests, the plants, the birds and all other species? Who trembles in the mines that extract coltan for our cell phones? Is it trembling to make the world?