Je t’aime moi non plus [I No Longer Love Me] (2018)
Video, colour and sound
29′ (6′ 37” looped video)
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2018.526.1
Framed by grey fields – Sebald said of Stendhal that he perceived the past as grey fields, and in the video the initial grey lasts for more than a minute – Je t’aime moi non plus revisits images recorded by the artist’s mother sometime in the 1990s. Alongside the many concrete cultural elements of a specific period, there emerges a generation and even a place charged with symbolism and emotion for the artist (and this is perhaps untransferable). There is much that is symbolic and emotional: even from a distance, he senses the immense utopian fascination his mother perceives in every gesture of the world, and that fascination returns to him as an inheritance – or perhaps as a force of transformative conviction as well…
Pablo Marte develops a practice that is textual, graphic, filmic, conversational, and timidly performative, unfolding along a path that is never straight, direct, or self-evident between desire and experience, between what has been lived and what is yet to be lived. He starts from the idea that desire always precedes the capacity to imagine, and that it guides and determines the fluctuating spectrum of the imaginary and the imaginative. He calls this way of investigating, weaving, writing, and drawing ‘mariposeo’ (‘butterflying’). Mariposeo consists in turning the wandering inherent to deviation into a dialectical form of orientation: a play between getting lost and finding oneself again. It is a process of unfolding, of bringing images, signs, and their procedural repercussions into life, described elsewhere as ‘a cruising through the semantic cane field’.