【OCAT Shanghai｜About Works】On Translation: El aplauso

Video installation. 10'

This video installation is shown in the form of a triptych. On the two side screens the images and sound of the applause of the audience at an unspecified event are oriented towards the central screen, where the audience clapping are shown front on. At regular fifteen or twenty seconds intervals, the image being shown on the central screen changes rapidly, in a kind of blink of the eye or subliminal snapshot, giving a glimpse of an image of overt violence, in black and white and with no sound. Those images, which tackled violence in all its categories, come from Colombia and other places around the world. As other earlier projects, which took a look at the processes of transformation and translation of violence into media spectacle, El aplauso understood as a social convention denoting consensus, satisfaction and acceptance-is approached as a metaphor for the immaterial identity of the audience, its alienation and complicity, represented here by the repetitive, monotonous gesture of clapping. In short, a portrait of the obscene morbidity with which the media translate and accept the atrocities that are committed anywhere in the world. A strident work, which tries to denounce the increasing mediatisation of conflicts and disasters in our daily lives.

In an illuminating essay about On Translation: El aplauso, José Ignacio Roca has explained that the Colombian media have formed a habit of packaging the frightening unpredictability of life in Colombia by producing presentation formats that reduce this situation—and the drug wars more generally—to the utterly predictable elements in a never- changing series of entertainment: "[On Translation: El aplauso] shows up the treatment of violent events by the local media and the passive and cynical attitude they have generated in the audience." In his installation Muntadas seeks to return to information its disquieting tendency to shatter established systems, returning well-ordered normalcy to a palpable sense of disorder. On Translation: El aplauso and other works show that the reduction of unpredictability that is a hallmark of our mass media is but a thin veneer of ordered sense over a violent abyss of utter unpredictability and entropy. Far from being a bastion of stability that ensures that messages can reach their sender in an unadulterated form, the meaning- of "messages" is threatened by this entropy at its very core.

Sven Spieker

Muntadas' entropic archives (2011)