The Independent in 30 days

Ulysses way © Damián Ortega © Barbican Centre/ Photograph © Eliot Wyman


Damián Ortega has created a series of installations for the Curve Gallery at the Barbican centre that answers daily titles over one month of a newspaper's events. He has picked The Independent as paper of choice because, he says, it is the most familiar in terms of ideological position and it reminds him La Jordana, the newspaper where he worked as political cartoonist in Mexico. 
Ortega gave himself the task to produce one piece a day, working from nearly nothing, using underrated materials such as concrete, fire bricks, rocks, wooden planks, found, discarded, everyday objects to capture aspects of the news, de-construct and re-contextualise.














The big melt - cities at risk, The Independent, 31st of August 2010


In september, the highlight is on the Chilean miners, the BP oil spill and the flood in Pakistan. The work emphasizes economical and cultural injustice while stressing on climate change and capitalism affecting the welfare of vulnerable communities : a bicycle carries the possessions of a flood survivor in Pakistan; a precarious aggregate of wooden planks and empty water containers resembles an obstacle course, depicting the state of a submerged Pakistan two weeks later, drawing an uncertain future for the fleeing survivors now facing malaria. The installations' visual impact informs the viewers in a way that the fleeting news can't, despite the disposable manner we consume news, the work impacts on the viewers' memory.















No link - 2010 © Damián Ortega © Barbican Centre/ Photograph © Eliot Wyman

The iconic image of the bicycle counterbalances the highlight of another day's title, when Ryanair's boss denials global warming, an assumption questioned by Ortega's plane made of cigarettes. Ortega needs to work fast and that immediacy and experimental spontaneity responds well to the essence of the news.














Immigrant song © Damián Ortega © Barbican Centre/ Photograph © Eliot Wyman



He also find the opportunity to exemplify the global cultural gap of the North-South divide, or as one journalist from The Independent puts it why across the world the poor are kept poor so the rich can be kept rich. At the beginning of the show, a zigzagging brick wall mimicking a graph of statistics that depicts the number of illegal immigrants living in America, acts as a reminder of the mexican borders daily crossed by individuals hoping for a better life.














© Barbican Centre / Photograph © Eliot Wyman


On the other side of the wall, thrown-and-broken eggs shells transcend an incapacity to confront the capitalist machine and recall the fragility of human life in the streets of Mexico.
That image echoes another photograph of dead students caught between local dealers and the drugs war police, from an article that condemns a western need for drug consumption that encourages a war on foreign ground but not on home ground.



















Greed and Graft © Damián Ortega © Barbican Centre/ Photograph © Eliot Wyman

At the beginning of the exhibition, the shell of a cemented barrel in which a candle burns slowly is connected to its top by an electric wire, symbolising the suffocating entrapment of the Chilean in a copper and gold mine. The hole with no alternative exit summarizes pretty simply the underlying thread of the show - capitalism versus poverty, greedy profit versus human safety.
Ortega is very much aware of his comfortable position as an artist addressing political issues. Like artists Allora & Calzadilla, while avoiding to be confined within the limits of political art, his work is rooted in political activism.