Enric Maurí

Spain

Work: " Estrés: los cuerpos y las cosas" ("Stress: bodies and things") (2023) 

The waters of the Han River run through the images of the video from the first scenes. They merge with an overflowing frenzy about programmed obsolescence, compulsive consumption and the body itself as another object on which to speculate. A scenario of the uneasiness created through the networks and the consumerist maelstrom that confronts us. In the end, the imposing Mapo Bridge, under which the Han River flows, fixes in the retina a space built by human despair: the place where many Koreans overwhelmed by consumerism decide to commit suicide.

This South Korean landscape constitutes a biopolitical landscape, which defines and is defined by the current subject. The subjectivity of human agency over geography manifests itself as a space of imagination, a zone of expansion of the self and its desires and wishes, but also, as in this case, of its obsessions and fears.