Jaime Miranda Bambarén
(Monumento Films)
Semillas 16 / 13 lunas  /
/ Huevos de anaconda colonizan Manhattan
2021
Video / 07:08′
(Música: Eric Maltz
Cámara: Jaime Miranda Bambarén / Juan Manuel Olivera)
Colección MICROMUSEO
(“al fondo hay sitio”)

Derechos reservados (Copyright):
Jaime Miranda Bambarén

Transparencia (Disclosure):
este video entrelaza ficciones y datos reales
(this video interweaves fiction and fact)

Sinopsis del artífice:

“Algunas situaciones generadas durante el tallado final de las Semillas. Tomas realizadas en mi taller al aire libre, en los extremos de la interminable Lima. Apunté la cámara y pedí a mis asistentes que me ignoraran.

‘Ver algo y abstraerse a un plano distinto, eso hacen los magos’.
(Don Mariano, frase tomada de un sueño del 8 de noviembre del 2020)”.

(Jaime Miranda Bambarén)

MANHATTAN SURRENDERS TO ANACONDA EGGS
(ANACONDA EGGS CONQUER MANHATTAN)

Perceptual and judgmental schemes are conditioned by social positions, making it possible to classify viewpoints. Without a particular social experience, Manhattan Surrenders to Anaconda Eggs wouldn’t be considered an audiovisual field report on the social struggles underlying value creation in the contemporary artistic international arena.

American skyscrapers and helicopter images appear in sequence with Peruvian chopped tree trunks, unburied tree roots, and a crashed plane. Peruvian intellectuals criticize “modern” society and its reliance on technology and emphasize how carved roots transformed into round Seeds express the organic world and Peruvian cultural patterns. Peruvian peasants and artisans share their sociodicies, too. One peasant affirms that they are the core of the Western World and the foreigners are zombies to be conquered with the Seeds.

The Seeds were exhibited in Madrid (Spain), the crashed plane in Lima, Peru. The video depicts those events, the workshop where the wood is sculpted, and the fields supplying the roots. The operation demands heavy equipment, as a truck and a crane involved in the roots transportation and placement indicates, questioning the art critics Gustavo Buntinx —who distrusts modernity and technology— and Jorge Villacorta Chávez, to whom the Seeds are a reference to organicity and a Peruvian cultural essence.

By sleight of hand, the seven minutes eight seconds video kidnaps one side of the story: we know nothing about the private agreements that finance the project and pay for the services intended to extract, transport, or carve the roots; the commercial catalog approach betrays the ethnological ambition, hiding behind the mythical aspects of the everyday consciousness that pretends that oversized bowling balls (made of wood) have mystical powers. But this would be an oversimplification without considering the risks involved in this unique enterprise because they are the source of its value in the art field, too. Challenging economic, symbolic, cultural, and social norms demand similar capitals and an artist apt to face such pressures.

Manhattan Surrenders to Anaconda Eggs as a production adheres to a process common among Peruvian audiovisual artists like Leonidas Zegarra [De nuevo a la vida (1973)] or Fernando Gutiérrez, AKA ‘Huanchaco’ [La chucha perdida de los incas]: the final product is made of material developed at different moments, when new funds are available. Jaime Miranda follows the same path by combining images obtained at very different times and circumstances, from London (graffiti at the end) to New York (himself walking in front of the New York County Supreme Court), and from the Peruvian fields to Carabayllo (in Lima, where the workshop is). These images do not belong to a single project, even though most correspond to the development of one particular artistic project.

The second aspect that makes the video most fascinating is the amount of self-reference. Knowing the “footage” was recorded at different times under unrelated circumstances pleasures the connoisseur. Like Orson Welles in F for Fake (1973), believability depends on the viewer’s ignorance. By studying the 59 videos Jaime Miranda has on Vimeo (January 25, 2022), vimeo.com/jaimemirandabambaren, it is possible to identify the versions from where the images come. So, this audiovisual story, comprised of segments of many other stories, allows us to notice the accumulation of past undertakings that become the new experience whose past may not be as linear as we think it is.

Cultivated observers are interested in style as a relational concept between artworks. Applying such practice to Manhattan Surrenders to Anaconda Eggs and noticing how the same images have been edited in other videos by the same author is like surfing his audiovisual worlds with the help of key-images instead of key-words. Having more interest in this artist’s oeuvre will give greater pleasure.

(Jorge Villacorta Santamato)