ON BECOMING: A Mediation (Vermittlung)
Maria Bilbao·Herrera
Video Performance, Digital /Analog Collage.
Installation.
ON BECOMING: A Mediation (Vermittlung) is an experimental and personal visual research and exploration as a relatively direct response to the radical mix of cultural, political, technological, and economic changes within the uncertain worlds within which I move myself in. I try to look at how money reconciles the various forces of history, culture, economics and the self, and how we use it as a mediation to navigate these various meanings and values, from a personal to a global sphere and vice versa.
By recording myself in the computer screen, I physically try to make fit my own image into the printed faces of bills, and then rerecording it from the projected video, I exercise collaging myself and the Venezuelan devaluated Bolivar bill, I create this layers and noise that give the sensation we “become” one in the digital space.
As Deleuze and Guattari explain, the process of "becoming" is not one of imitation or analogy, it is generative of a new way of being that is a function of influences rather than resemblances. The process is one of removing the element from its original functions and bringing about new ones. My education and culture are governed by divergent conceptions of life. I was born in Venezuela from an immigrant European family.
My identity is redefined by mobility. Everyday experiences, as mediators, push me into a multiplicity of overlapping and often conflicting roles; hence I am always in a state of “On Becoming”, a mediation between almost opposite personal ways of perceiving the world. Mediation in Marxist theory (German: Vermittlung) refers to the reconciliation of two opposing forces within a given society by a mediating object.
In a world of mediations, we never have unaltered access to the “use value” of anything. Our sense of a thing ́s usefulness and it ́s “true” value is, under capitalism, always mediated. Money is mediation itself materialized, and so it appears as immediate, unmediated, perfect and mimetic. The neoliberal, financialised moment of capitalism is one when, increasingly, all other spheres of life and value are in the process of being collapsed under money’s measure.
Mediation implies a field of sub-personal intensities in which, following Foucault, being oneself no longer makes sense or, following Deleuze, subjectivity is paradoxically both collective and individual.
“Money talks, because money is a metaphor, a transfer and a bridge. Like words and language, money is a storehouse of communally achieved work, skill and experience.” Marshall McLuhan, 1964
Money, as Marx explained, causes us to fundamentally misrecognize the creativity we all exercise everyday in reproducing society and the capitalist “economy” that preys on it.
References, and research based on readings of: Art and money: Three aesthetic strategies in an age of financialisation, Max Haiven, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Canada And: Vilém Flusser Deleuze Guattari Marx McLuhan
