Incertidumbre y Fracaso (2017)

Video - 8'25''

Incertidumbre y Fracaso/Uncertainty and Failure is a collaborative video installation by Luis Vasquez La Roche and Joanna Helfer created during Helfer’s Transatlantic Artists Residency at Alice Yard in Trinidad and Tobago in 2017. The work began as a series of investigative walks exploring significant spaces within the Trinidadian landscape. Each walk aimed to uncover hidden meanings or narratives within the space and provide a framework for discussion and collaborative conversation.

This work represents an attempt by the artists to explore both the correlations and contradictions within their practices and their experience of a transnational encounter, and is composed by their interests in language, sound, video, memory and ritual. The video documents the act of exchanging written texts that are then destroyed before they are read. Not only through the act of burning but also through the act of documenting this erasure or destruction of memory, the artwork becomes a failed attempt to let go as it instead consolidates and embodies memory. The accompanying soundtrack is a confessional collection of words exchanged between the artists generated as a stream of consciousness in response to watching the footage, as well as their research into theories of language, narrative and territory. Their words are combined untranslated, encapsulating their attempts to communicate and their acknowledgement that they cannot. Finally, these words become a text piece presented as a large scale screen-print designed to both guide and obscure the work.