Vicente Mollestad



Lives and works in El Alto, Bolivia.
Click here for portfolio, contact info++


-

Vive y trabaja en El Alto, Bolivia

Haz clic aquí para portfolio, contacto ++









Mark






Green Infernos (2017) is reflection on the idea of uncolonizable nature, a concept borrowed from the trope of Italian cannibal films of the 70s and 80s. In short, the films play out like this: white people travel into an unknown wilderness and ends up killed, raped and eaten by the climate, animals and cannibals. Ultimately proposing an utopian and fetishized idea of wilderness related to the other. 
An anecdote from the trip became a starting point for a short story that intended to expand upon the themes as well as open up the “abstractions”. The story was made into a publication and  risoprinted for the exhibition.


Originally shown at Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS in Amsterdam.

                                                                     Green Inferno, Installation view, 2017.
 

The Use of Force Will Eventually Yield(2018) is the first in a series of performances that I made in the format of the red light, a temporary space utilised by street entertainers to make money. The series of performances aim to open this space for abstract political discourse. This one in particular is related to Bolivia’s conflicts in the past and future surrounding it’s natural resources. The performance itself consisted of boxing a gas can for the duration of the red light, sometimes receiving money from the waiting cars after the performance. This was repeated until exhaustion, wearing a mix of boxing and orthopedic wear to underline the relationship between fragility and violence.

Performed and developed during the residency Inmaterial  in La Paz, 2018. 


               
                                       The Use of Force Will Eventually Yield, performance documentation, 2018. 



I Close My Eyes but Never to Sleep (2018) was a result of a text written about the ecstacy of driving with your eyes closed and collecting images of car crashes as they would appear in Bolivian news media. Proposing to look at them as abstractions, the car sun shaders became their natural link through the gesture of covering the field of view. And I began investigating the images default on these shaders as they are the same as default digital wallpaper on phone, tablets and computers, depicting a type of hyper reality. Reflecting on the process of generating paradise-like images as something linked to a awareness of own human mortality.

The publication constists of dialogue between a painter who scans his paintings through google-image-search in the hunt for something unique and a taxi driver who likes to drive with his eyes close to reach a state of ecstacy. Expanding ideas of fetish, related to violence through images as ideas of the imagined realities and violence as a final form of abstraction.


Originally shown in a partly abandoned building for sale in La Paz, Bolivia, 2018.




     
           
                                                                             I Close My Eyes but Never to Sleep, 2018.


Vicentes pursuit lays in the relationship between obvious and less obvious akin information put into play by personal urgency. Through his work, connections and relationships are investigated, obsessed over and given forms that proposes new ideas and questions on how to process things like the transnational, the apocalyptic, the colonial and the esoteric.

         

                                                               The Heroes Are or Were Members of Society , 2015.





















                               






                                                       







                                                                      





















Mark