2021: Dejame Vivir un Día

Video Essay
by Lechuga Zafiro,

This episode of our 2021 video series by visual artist Jusomor and sound artist Lechuga Zafiro is deeply inspired by the re-encounter with our elders during the current times of uncertainty and confusion.

This video will be screened at Rewire Festival 2021. The video has thus been taken down temporarily and will be accessible on this page after the festival again.

Dejame vivir un día is a collaborative audiovisual artwork by visual artist Jusomor (Argentina) and sound artist Lechuga Zafiro (Uruguay). The Río de la Plata region is heavily striked by unemployment, a health and an economic crisis caused by the pandemic, forcing us to go back to our families house after years of economic independence. Dejame vivir un día is deeply inspired by the re-encounter with our elders: the culture they consume, their bodies, their homes, the memories of our childhood. It’s the rummage of our past and a new intergenerational tie that stimulated us to choose the images and sounds we chose to poetically represent the present we find ourselves in.

The piece begins by citing an anonymous poem from the XV century, Romancero del enamorado y la muerte: «La muerte me anda buscando (death is looking for me).» An older generation seems most threatened by COVID-19, as the virus targets them. Sounds and images rapidly succumb into chaos, as we convey the feeling of uncertainty and confusion that has prevailed through 2020 and the start of 2021.

Dejame vivir un día is about introspection, regression, slowness, suffocation, but also about finding our own artistic voice and expanding the notion of «individuation» through reconnection with a past self.

For the 2021 edition of the Norient Film Festival NFF, Norient commissioned ten artists around the world to work on short artistic media pieces. They were asked to reflect on their personal thoughts of «2021». How do they see and describe the world they live in? How do they see the present and the future? What sounds, clips, media pieces, and thoughts give hope for «2021» and for the future? What makes them angry, hopeful, depressed, suicidal, or happy?

Biography

Lechuga Zafiro a.k.a. Pablo de Vargas is an Uruguayan DJ and producer. Straddling the line between the exploratory nature of club culture and the poetics of sound design, he seeks to express the nuances of Latin American experience through his music. Follow him on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Facebook, X, Instagram, and https://open.spotify.com/intl-it/artist/59CKhQjneZAPQKYcylrsVd?autoplay=true” target="_blank">Spotify.

Biography

Jusomor crosses the borders between the field of design and the field of contemporary art, in search of a hybrid language in constant development centered on their affinities and on the tension in their epistemological character. Across different media (photoshop crafts, objects, performance and video) Jusomor works around the constant idea of recovering a lost balance through friction, while focusing on a community corpus. Follow him on Instagram, and on his Website.

Published on February 04, 2021

Last updated on April 10, 2024

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