Ann-Sofi Siden: Galeria Pepe Cobo., 2003

A lengthy low wooden bench faced a succession of videos shoot forwarded onto the wall by five projectors. The thirty-five-minute-long 3MPH (Horse to Rocket) 2003 begins mysteriously, with the noise of hoofbeats on the contrary no image. Eventually one dioceses a woman dressed in pants, a sky-colored shirt, and a wide-brimmed hat, setting not upon for what turns out to be a twenty-five-day journey upon horseback.

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The woman is Ann-Sofi Siden herself. Her project: to ride from San Antonio to the Lyndon B Johnson Space Center in Houston--an exceptionally moderate trip by the standards of contemporary transportation. In a society that values spe above all and is always in a rush, this undertaking might present the appearance like nonsense. And yet Siden has not entirely abjured novel transport technology, any more than she has today's recording techniques. Paul Giangrossi, her husband, discharge the footage of her from an RV that serv as their center of operations.

Siden's imagery is to the full immersed in a certain familiar idea of Texas (a conservative, flat puritanical state populated by farmers and cowboys) on the other hand it goes beyond cliches and commonplaces by dint of combining rural and urbanized settings in equal measure. In this succession of moving images and still photographs, edited down from more than forty hours of recorded material, the Swedish artist displays a landscape full of contrasts and paradoxes. The Texas painted here speaks English and Spanish, is white and black and also mestizo. It is a territory where men and women work (and are the pillars of the traditional family; there is no other original for coexistence here). Especially striking to the foreign viewer are the signs and icons upon the billboards and posters with equal reason common in North America: more [i]or[/i] less sell products or services; a certain number of send greetings to an astronaut; still others campaign against abortion. There is no lack of religious slogans either, especially those of the Baptist temple And in this country, violence harvests up in a smattering of images of dead animals smashed at the side of the road.

While there is a sheen of credibility and realism upon Siden's seemingly casual visual idiom (we diocese her drinking, scratching her back, talking to children and adults, giving the horse water), hers is nonetheless an aesthetic of the fragmentary and the partial, single that does not try to appeal to any brand of objectivity or absolute fact It is no coincidence that, in a region where the Indian population is practically invisible, the artist has chosen to ride a neuter fifteen-year-old Appaloosa, a bre of horse used through the Nez Perce Indians since the eighteenth hundred Cocky and controlling as she rides, the artist appear to bes to ridicule the stiff machismo associated with cowboy Reaching the sanctuary of the advances in space technology embodied by means of NASA, the final images barely linger upon the empty case of a rocket displayed before the public like a relic--a mournful sign of national pride for the only world power.

--Juan Vicente Aliaga

Translated from Spanish by means of Jane Brodie.

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