Ro Caminal, Unfolding Penelope, installation view with visitors, Eva Maria Ocherbauer 2017.
Born Barcelona, Spain (1966), lives and works in Barcelona, Spain
Hook a boat 2016
Single channel stereo video, 5.27mins
No dialogue
Unfolding Penelope 2017
Single channel stereo video, 20.34mins
Original language: French
Courtesy of the artist
Hook a boat
Hook a boat critically addresses the landscape drawn by the relationship between life of abundance of Western citizenship and the survival of immigrants trying to reach Europe. This opposition occurs, superficially and almost exclusively, when Westerners watch TV. The theatrical and playful nature of the images portrays a desolate and dehumanized European landscape.
Unfolding Penelope
Departing from the title, the video establishes a divergent parallelism between the spouses of the Senegalese immigrants and Odyssey’s Penelope. Parallelism as all of them remain prolonged periods of time, waiting for the return home of their husbands. Divergence as these women not only occupy the place of Penelope, but subvert it. Odyssey’s Penelope is a subordinate character, who does not speak for herself and is relegated to the home space. In Unfolding Penelope, the main characters are these women. They are both the object and the subject, breaking the silence that the social context imposes. Thus taking the power of enunciation and questioning the spectator by breaking a double stereotype: being a woman and being an African one, to tell us how they use their agency to negotiate with the social pressure that surrounds them, that, like the Odyssey would like to relegate them to a second plane.
The video breaks the Eurocentric gaze, which tends to look at immigration as something that changes our nearby landscape, but tends to silence the effects and changes that it causes in the emigrant’s homeland.
The video questions the traditional figure of the testimony, experimenting with ways in which to show audio visual ethnography, emphasizing that all narration is built or silenced by the social gaze. For this reason, the video maintains the theatrical structure that arose from the research and work process.
