1 ola majestic en mi balconee | 1 majestik wave en mi balco-knee

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translator’s note:

1 majestik wave en mi balco-knee is a work that ponders on the resistance of late-capitalist forms of leisure in the context of climatic disasters. The landscapes produced by the Mediterranean real-estate bubble, when mixed with the sand and seawater that blur its urbanism, serve as a setting from which to reflect on the deficiencies and numbing that neoliberal processes of subjectivation manifest in the face of the emergence of critical situations at a global or collective level. A sound piece in which 'vocality' is decomposed into a digital and fragmentary use of speech, shaping perception but not messages, 1 majestik wave en mi balco-knee is also a textual-visual work in which this fictional and hallucinated distance, reconfigured into a tour through these dystopian landscapes, seeks to avoid the position of the critical privileged observer. On the contrary, it imagines the possibility of a reflexivity that may affirm its inevitable belonging to the trip: the camera moves with us, and the majestic and tremendous journey does not belong exclusively to an alien and irresponsible other, but also to ourselves. The dystopia that comes with the climate disaster will not appear, does no longer appear, with any sort of epic distance, emotional mystery or with a possibility of blaming someone else. In a similar way to the health crisis with which the current decade has begun, it places us before a management of the evil whose faint-hearted and anesthetic quality might come as a surprise.

Through the generation of a series of speculative events in which certain (un)natural disasters converge with the scenarios of consumerist pleasure generated in spas, hotels, beach clubs, free buffets and guided tours, 1 majestik wave en mi balco-knee aims to pause before the contradiction of the historical and subjective simultaneity of the desire for strong emotions, obtainable at the touch of a contactless credit card, with the discourses and data on global warming, the rising sea levels and the effects of human intervention on the earth. The ruinous snapshots that the confinements and travel bans of 2020 left on the retina of the internet, as well as the images of the increasingly constant seawater expansions and damages to coastal urbanism as a result of storms, serve as the visual archive materials for 1 majestik wave en mi balco-knee.

1 majestik wave en mi balco-knee re-positions Francis Lo's A Series of Un / Natural / Disasters, a socially-committed poetry work about the US government abandonment of its population after Hurricane Katrina, in the emotional and spatial transit of the different ‘selves’ that inhabit the pleasure of the coasts in Spain without any possibility of ethical coherence. A part of the language of 1 majestik wave en mi balco-knee is taken from the consensual discourses about tourism in Spain, as well as from its institutional and corporate slogans and their equivalents in the digital spectrum (the online bureaucratic language of consent, which is understood as the current condition of possibility for numerous neoliberal processes). We place these discursive fragments together with the unwanted but concrete images and linguistic emissions that occur in the touristic sites: bodies which lie and float in the excess of inhabiting a space with no future. As a consequence of that crossover, the work occurs through two different channels of reading and listening that turn out unclassifiable within the different ‘'language orders' and their norms: at the same time that one listens to an intentionally lyrical Spanish, “corrupted” due to its constant mixture with the languages brought by the Mediterranean tourists (English and German, mainly) and the co-official Mediterranean languages spoken in those holiday areas (Mallorcan, Catalan, Valencian), resulting in a break of the national-state monolith, one can read an English that is no longer such, i.e., a bastardized English whose Latinisms become Castilianisms, producing a reading difficulty in the reception of the English code. In tandem, all of this causes a perceptive distortion which operates both at the auditory level and at the textual level. The blurring of the identity and national dimension also generates an interference or liquefaction of the textual materiality at an orthographic and phonic level: towards misprints, glitch and numbness.

The place from which the different “I”s, or selves, of 1 majestik wave en mi balco-knee speak is one of a hallucinated perception, capable of converting each conjuncture into pleasure and apparent illumination in order to keep the consistency of a leisure experience. The 1 majestik wave self is not a specific self and could in fact be many selves at the same time: the piece seeks to maintain the non-referential nature of the first person singular pronoun. Post-vitalist, ecologically aware or eager for experiences, the “I” and its sensitive dispersion overlap and mix, presenting ethical multiplicity as the basic characteristic of the sociable-sensory quality of our time.'

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credits

Video-editing: j g oteíza
English translation: George Hutton
Special thanks to: Adrián Aldihni