Julieta Aranda, Stealing one’s own corpse (An alternative set of footholds for an ascent into the dark)

Julieta Aranda, Stealing one’s own corpse (An alternative set of footholds for an ascent into the dark), 2014, 31:59 minutes
PART 1: “The Conquest of space is part of the planetary hope of an economic system which, saturated with commodities, spectacles and power, ejaculates into space when it arrives at the end of the noose of its terrestrial contradictions.” This statement, by the Venezuelan thinker Eduardo Rothe (an ex-member of the International Situationist as well as an Hugo Chavez collaborator), opens Julieta Aranda’s Stealing one’s own corpse (an alternative set of footholds for an ascent into the dark) Part 1 (2014). 

On this video, a conversation between six blurred-out characters is combined with footage found on the internet, high-end computer animation and documentation of the artist’s experience in a reduced-gravity aircraft, creating a narrative that observes the interconnection between neoliberal economies and their reliance on growth, environmental destruction, genetics, and space exploration. The result is a complex, expanded investigation of escapology, the practice of escaping. Presented as a basic animal drive, a human desire, an utopic possibility, an economic and political strategy, and a science, the act of escaping is analyzed in its historical and contemporary significances and considered under biopolitical and environmental optics.

PART 2: Swimming in rivers of glue—The perspective of perspective (2016) adds another chapter to the artist’s exploration of the cultural and political imaginary of escaping with an equally upsetting and intense assemblage of found and recorded footage. This time, the combination of digital sounds and computerized, distorted voices that composed the audio of the first part of the series gives way to an equally immersive soundscape of organic noises, in which bodily fluids and syncopated heartbeats connect the viewer’s own physicality with the absent body of the artist.

Julieta Aranda is and artist and an editor of e-flux journal.

For more information, contact laika@e-flux.com.