[Nettime-bold] Adequatio Artis et Torturae – Towards MarcelloMercados Capital

[Nils Röller <nils@khm.de>]

Adequatio Artis et Torturae – Towards Marcello Mercados Capital

Primo Levi spoke once about the shame to be a human being. The shame to
be a human being did grow within him after having survived the
holocaust. Levi wrote that the shame to have been tortured, to have been
treated in a way that cannot be seen in parallels to other treatments,
did grow in himself after the liberation of the concentration camps.
This is one factor that helps to see Marcello Mercados work “The
Capital”. The videofilm is a work in progress since years, it is finding
now its shape. The actual state is 70 minutes long. Most time the
capital is formed by moving abstract colours and an overhelming
soundscape.
The film is not all the time abstract.
This has to do with the second factor: Of colourmaking and of
abstraction. The color Fra Angelico became famous for  - the Fra
Angelico blue – goes back to lapizlazuli stones. Very expensive stones
and a very long and precious way were necessary to produce colour from
these stones. Marcello Mercados colours go back to Super 8 films: films
of tortured persons in Argentina. It is found footage material that
someone gave to him. Mercados colour productions starts from these
images. He shows this basic images at the end of the film.
At the end of the film one starts to feel shame, shame to have liked
colours and forms that have been abstracted from yellow, blue,
deformated, burned bones and organs.
Marcellos work challenges an old definition of what is true or not.
True is when mental concepts are adequate to the things they represent.
Three questions do arise immediatley: What is a mental concept? What is
an adequate representation? And what are things?
Stefan Zweig discusses aspects of this questions in the context of the
theory of novel. Zweig argues that Dostojewskis novels are beautiful
because they are truly lived through: The writer Dostojewski did live
through all the cruelties and tortures he is writing about.

This enabeld him in the interpetation of Zweig to represent Russia in a
true that is adequat form. Zweig argumentation assumes that art is
overhelming when an adequation between the representing artists and the
represented reality is taking place. This is highly problematic. At
minimum in two regards: First because Dostojewski did need a central
idea (in his case: the idea of the becoming moral superiority of russia)
in order to maintain and persue the construction of his novels, second
because the adeqution is a relativ criterion. At the same time, but in
a  different geophilosphical context the definition of adequatio is not
connected with an action of the soul, but to well working technology
(see for example the biologist Ernst Haeckel).

How an adeqution is performed can be discussed in terms of
geophilosophical and epistemic conditions. Marcellos Mercados The
capital reflects this. Like Dostojewski he has survived extreme
situations, but in difference to Dostojewski Marcello does not construct
a central idea in order to organize his expressions. Marcello uses
distinctly technology in order to question what he has seen and
suffered. Flint- and Paintbox – Techniques are used as optical devices
who do shape another view on the phenomena to express. This enables him
to step beside his powerstation of sensations and to discuss them from a
different angle. Colour options and geometric constructions are such
angles. They are laid out in the programm of the machines. But this
angels are not focussed by a fleeing point, but by an open horizont
formed by  a critique on capitalism.
The Capital of Marx serves in the Capital of Mercado as an open horizont
of questions (not as stock for clear ideas that may order actions and
events) and as an invitation to discuss the fact of torture and cruelity
in a post-colonial time.

Please check also note on Cusco
www.tuxamoon.de/text/Kerzenhaendler/vorwort.html
And on Toti in South America (in english) www.tuxamoon.de/text/Toti.html

Nils Röller
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