“头部 (The Head)” is an art installation based on the analysis of Chinese Communist posters. When the posters represent the “idea”, people are always down the picture and the Mao Tse Tung portrait always floating in heaven, protecting that theory founded in the Russian winters. When they want to describe the pragmatics, Mao is cultivating flowers, going to visit schools, etc.
The idea with “The Head” is to think why the “communist theory” fails in its application to reality, and this is because many times the idea has to be corresponded o taken through a body, a body that exercises the idea, that exercises power. That’s why, part of the installation that we present here, invites people to get into the head, so we all can have the feeling that we are not loyal to the theory; the idealization is as dangerous as it is obsessive.
This art installation is only an accessory to the most important, that is the representation of the power of the idea, represented by 3 characters (performers) that go round the head, feeling that invasion, that invisible force that invades our bodies, a communist tragicomedy. The rite is a tribute to the invisible, to what we couldn’t see and couldn’t feel but that this search makes us feel more alive; the human lives of rites.
Mao, or better said China, speaks about the contradiction of this system. China has a communist government, but its factories create capitalist products, politics don’t exist. If the idea is not based on gain, it is not profitable. Mao represents the past, a sacred figure. He is a body that instead of being human is a part of human history.
Sculptor: Marcos Berta
Performance: Elsa Sauguet, Sebastian Reinoso Salinas y Ines Maas.
