Nefandus Trilogy by Carlos Motta
Carlos Motta's interdisciplinary artistic practice includes the making of video essays, documentaries and online video archives. His early video Letter to My Father (Standing by the Fence) (2005) narrates the experience of living and working in New York City at the aftermath on 9/11 and focuses on the personal and political intersections of immigrants within that context.
Motta is interested in questioning the structures of power that control and regulate civic life as well as hegemonic construction of historical narratives. One of his most recognized projects is We Who Feel Differently (2012), a comprehensive video archive of interviews with dozens of queer subjects that speak about the forty years of gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer activism from a variety of social perspectives. The installation was first presented in a solo exhibition at New York's New Museum in 2012 to great acclaim.
Motta's most recent video works Nefandus Trilogy will have its World Premiere at the 2014 International Film Festival Rotterdam's Tiger Awards Competition.
Composed of three short films, Nefandus (winner of Catalonia Hotels Award for Best Video at LOOP, Barcelona, 2013), Naufragios and La visión de los vencidos, the trilogy exposes the imposition of the category 'sexuality' onto indigenous cultures in the Americas during the Conquest and throughout the colonial period, based on moral and legal discourses of sin and crime. These works will also be presented at the First International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias in
February.
