Text by Helaine Posner, Francesc Torres, Mar Villaespesa, and Marilyn A. Zeitlin
9.25" x 11", 136 pages, 142 illustrations
Published in 1988
A major new video-installation by Francesc Torres titled Belchite/South Bronx: A Trans-Cultural and Trans-Historical Landscape will be presented by the University Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from January 30 to March 19, 1988.
Torres has videotaped in the abandoned village of Belchite in northeastern Spain, which was virtually destroyed in 1937 in a major battle of the Spanish Civil War. The taping explores the village to give a sense of location, focusing on the texture of the soil, and on the old, scarred walls of the buildings. The artist has also videotaped in New York's South Bronx, an urban battlefield scarred by peacetime destruction, which has become increasingly dead and abandoned with intermittent outbursts of violence. The camera work emphasizes the visual unity of these two locations by integrating images from Belchite and the South Bronx until they are virtually indistinguishable, creating the trans-cultural and trans-historical landscape of the title.
In Belchite/ South Bronx the video material unfolds in six channels on twelve monitors. The installation consists of an environment of highly stylized ruins depicting both sites and including tenement buildings, a bombed-out church, a basketball court, and the shell of an automobile. The monitors contained in these schematic structures function as stones or architectural rubble, archaeological carriers of information. Torres has also produced a self-contained, single-channel videotape on this subject, which will be available for viewing. Recent drawings by the artist will also be exhibited. The theoretical premise for Belchite/South Bronx is that the difference between war and peace exists only on statistical and rhetorical levels.
