Diego Barrera
Film director, art director and professor, focused on music videos. One of his last works was the video for the song "The Sun of the Natural World is Pure Fire" of the second collaboration album between Jim Jarmusch {as musician} and Jozef Van Wissem, where he mixed the ideas of the personification of the wounds, the symbolism of water, the elements and the myth of Hermaphrodite, presented at MoMA in New York and with the support of Pitchfork Magazine and Sacred Bones Records.
In his works it is possible to notice certain recurring themes: the figurative metamorphosis of his characters, the rites of androgynisation supporting a political speech in favor of feminism, understood as a struggle against social constraints, seeking to disestablish the gender rules. He has also a fascination with portraying the development of a spiritual journey in which the symbols embody the subconscious. Linking it to a dramatic line close to Romanticism that develops in almost sculptural decorations away from the classical aesthetics. His language is very influenced by the various branches of avant-garde art {sculpture, painting and literature} of Surrealism, Dada, Art Nouveau and Symbolism; and not so much by academicism.
The Sun of the Natural World is Pure Fire
(Jim Jarmusch & Jozef Van Wissem)
I’ve written a story in a way that its development would be fluid, a structure that would relate with the basic concept of the videoclip, the movement of water (and union of other elements, fire’s radiance in water when the soul heals)
A relationship after death, where the dimension or posthumous world presents itself with water, which is the environment where the two main characters have contact, one of them is the personification of a wound that is reopened which attracts and at the same time scares away, we pretend to sweeten it or violently try to make it disappear.
Seduction of the Armageddon Witches
(Mater Suspiria Vision)
The theme that unites the whole story is the duality of humans: femininity and masculinity. Inherently, the video explores how to get a foothold in this present time: restoring the importance of femininity in men, and the importance of women in a society governed by the largest patriarchy, the Catholic Church.
Hall of Ice
(Lebanon Hanover)
This video is presented as a confrontation, a symbolic representation of a struggle, criticizing the role of religious images (primarily christian), which serves to indoctrinate us into accepting the norms, educating us to accept corrupted society values, employing blame (pointing to each other), ideological superiority, in which "sin" is not understood like a principle of perfection {as explained by Oscar Wilde while in prison).
On the other hand, this video is also an ode to cultural universality as a principle of tolerance, an ode to the connection with femininity and eroticism, to Rebis {The Hermetic Androgyne}.
Catharsis (removal of thorns), build revolutionary mechanisms by means of opening the mind and fighting against social conditioning.
The Hermaphrodite, the union of opposites, the feminine and masculine (in connection with life and death) present in indigenous societies in Latin and North America from a sacred, divine approach. The alleged "discovery" of America must be understood today like a recoil in the understanding of the human being on its duality, imposing a speech which is not of these lands, imposing the blindness of a masculinized God, imposing a non liberating transvestism, dressing of morality and repression, imposing the unique models of a biological gender, but not of a gender that is socially constructed.
A Kinfe in the Sun
(Xiu Xiu)
My videos have multiple interpretations, this is just one of these:
I present two journeys, from darkness to the light of sea (from masculinity to eternal feminity), and the awns of a patriarcal society (The Religion, The Clinic and The Armed Forces), in their path to (masculinization) self-destruction.
The Alchemical Androgyne (The Hermafrodite / Rebis), ever present character in my videos, embodies my search in the androgenization rites, in this case a rite performed by indigenous tribes where a man makes a cut in his crotch as a symbol to inhabit in a woman body, to live in the middle of two imposed sexes. A symbolic castration that I present as an invitation to "man" to reflect about his feminity.
The other character is basically my way of using the right of rebellion through art, to criticize religion which seek to control the souls, current clinic aims to control the body (based not on health but disease) and The Armed Forces as the top of a pyramid that ends up collapsed.
Videos featuring a struggle, feminism understood as a struggle, whatever the fight against laws (which have been created by men) is a feminist struggle.