Phantom Limb

Clear Allegiance features the artist demonstrating by himself in the streets of Harlem with a transparent flag. Guagnini starts in the poorest part of the neighborhood, near a trash processing plant, and walks up to Columbia University, an island of privilege to which he indeed belongs himself as a professor. In keeping with the entwined politics of disenchanted capitulation and sly subversion, repositioning himself as a child of the failed revolutionary promises of 1968, Guagnini waves his flag in non-heroic moments, making the context his content, contingency his ideology. Negation and retreat are not an option, but neither is utopia. Transparency, surveillance, public space, reflection and reflexivity constitute the elements of Guagnini’s critical poetics of his time and space. Source: https://www.kinosued.com/

“[This video was made while] both Guagnini and Preiss were undergoing and studying Reichian therapy; developed by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, this form of therapy is used to attenuate tension (and therefore, trauma) through very quick breath and eye movements. Preiss’s sharp editing is key in embodying Reichian techniques through film, while much of the repressed trauma informing Guagnini’s performance references a history of the dictatorship in his native Argentina in the 1970s and 80s.” –MISHKIN GALLERY

Evoking the physiognomy of a Rembrandt portrait, Axiom of Choice depicts Jonas Mekas and his son Sebastian, their heads rotating in radiant chiaroscuro against a black ground. With Mekas at its center, the references to cinematic machinery abound in this work: from the proto-filmic zoetrope (which used a spinning cylinder to create the illusion of a moving image), to the flickering zoom of Ernie Gehr’s film Serene Velocity, to the enormous gyrating machine at the center of Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale. —Richard Birkett, Karin Schneider & Nicolás Guagnini