The Impossible Machine, 2012
Brushed iron, polyester sheet, water bottle, hyper-concentrated vitamin C solution, laminated wood, quarry sand, computer generated jungle sound and digital video. 350 x 190 x 350cm approx.
Installation view at A
Map
of
Misreading, TENT, Rotterdam, NL
The Impossible Machine recounts the history of a worker and his failed attempts to create a perpetual motion machine using spare parts and moments freed from the factory’s repetitive routine.
We follow the worker as he emigrates to Venezuela in the 1950s –then a tropical oil fueled dreamscape- escaping the moral and economic bankruptcy of Franco’s dictatorship. As the camera circles furiously through dense jungle vegetation, the narration recalls the colonization of Venezuela in the fifteenth century and the fortuitous encounter with pineapples. The fruit’s palindromic name ANANA and its geometrical shape echo the machine’s cyclical movement and the circularity in the worker’s life story.
