December 2, 1998




The Warm Place
Videoart
1998, 36 mins, stereo, Betacam , Spanish with English subtitles

Edition: Antonio Pita and Marcello Mercado
Music: Rei Rolle/Luis Lewin/Enrique Deschutter
and Triversion Ensemble Group.
Voices: Formación Sonora I, Escuela de Teatro, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina.
Sound Postproduction: Marcos Carreño
Oils: Germán Wendel
Hand Painted slides: Eduardo Las Heras
Texturas: Instituto del Diseño, Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad Católica de Córdoba, Argentina.
Graphics: Adrián Manavella
Off-line Editor: Pablo Romano
Cast: Mónica Ferrando/Gerardo Gudiño/Eduardo Las Heras/Agustín Villafañe/ Alejandro Brollo
Footage Archive: Carram Films/Miravalles Films/Savanco Films/Taier Films/ Lescano Films
Lighting: Luis Funes
Production: Mario Savanco, Alejandro Brollo, Marcello Mercado/
Goethe Institut, Córdoba, Argentina and
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation and The Lampadia Foundation.
Animation and Direction: Marcello Mercado

Eine persönliche Rekonstruktion, die der historischen Zersplitterung folgt,
verursacht durch Gewalt und die Verweigerung des Eing.

"Every image always consists of the components of which that image is made. But what happens if all the components 
are detached from each other, every image fragmented and the parts mixed together? This video seems to be a personal 
reconstruction built up out of a mountain of parts, a reconstruction of the fragmentation of historic images caused
by violence, but without the opportunity of finding out what happened. They are video fragments, drawings, photos,
hand-painted slides, symbols, sounds: every form of image and sound seems to be present in this bright world of
fragments tumbling through each other and round each other in all the colours of the rainbow. And in this world
everything seems to have fallen apart: images, text, the world and its history.
 No image remains what it was and a
personal interpretation has been added to each image that refers to a maker who is off screen. A new coherence is
introduced, new meanings assigned by the sequence of images, but also by the new combinations of image elements
in a frame. The image language reminds one of websites and CD-ROMs and the viewer gets the urge to stop
the image and get to the bottom of what is being shown here. What motivates the choice of images? Are they aesthetic
motivations or other things that lead to this stream of images? Finally, this bombardment of images does come to rest.
The sound changes to music. A beast hangs by one leg, waiting to be slaughtered: it is the stripping down and
fragmentation of a living being. With this comes an end to the wealth of possibilities. Born, lived and died.
And slaughtered, divided up by others and becoming a part of their history, never again to be reconstructed back to
what it was."

16th World Wide Video Festival 1998 
Catalogue: Page 314-315

World Wide Video Festival
Marnixstraat 411
1017 PJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands

20.10.1998

"We were all immediately and independently impressed by its obsessive logorrhea ...
the construct of the author regurgitating his own history ...
the process of the body eating iself being reflected in a compulsive reiteration of the technical and imagistic ...
redundancy as process insists on its own meaning, compresses the superficiality of the framed surface, transcends the
pathological through the concatenation of the
author's voice ... it was precisely this insistence on the emergence of the author's voice that we felt made this the work
to put in first place ... it says uncompromisingly this is what I do and also what I am ...”
(Videobrasil Jurors Statement,1998)

“Su estética se orienta hacia una lectura extremadamente crítica y con un fuerte grado de nihilismo, de la realidad
y de la historia argentinas, a través de una imagen fundada en la profusión de elementos visuales y sonoros, una
composición abigarrada y un diseño aventurado el los límites de lo perceptible”
(Rodrigo Alonso/Artistas Argentinos en el Concierto Digital/
Revista Buenos Aires Bellas Artes del Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes)

December 1, 1998

Fade Out: New Video, Part Two
Capsule by Fred Camper
From the Chicago Reader


"This is one of the strongest video programs I've ever seen; almost all the works present lush, sensuous imagery within a coherent structure that expresses the theme. The two best are also brilliantly disturbing. Gregg Biermann's The Hobgoblin of Little Minds (1999) mixes abstract imagery and representational photography to create powerful visual disruptions, the pieces seeming to spin away from each other. By returning to certain images--often banal ones such as a store sign--he suggests a mind haunted by trauma. Marcello Mercado's The Warm Place (1998), partly a reflection on Argentina's bloody "Dirty War," creates a horrible yet rich weave of hotly colored images (human dismemberment, frames within the frame, unsettling text fragments), each part seeming to infect the others. Several other videos are simpler but emotionally affecting nonetheless. Neil Goldberg's creepy My Parents Read Dreams I've Had About Them (1998) is a single long take of his parents in which, offscreen, he hands them pages to read, trapping them in his psychic life. Each of Pierre Yves Clouin's four witty homoerotic pieces explores a single concept: in Kangaroo (1998), fingers seem to emerge from, rather than enter, an anus. And in the sad, self-deprecating Fade Out (1998), Tony Buba prints texts over a single high-angle shot of Braddock, Pennsylvania, describing his absurdly arbitrary ways of calculating the length of the video or deciding when he should stop taking LSD. On the same program, works by Alfred Guzzetti and Michael Gitlin."