The installation por las calles va rebeca was based on four sound clips from the telenovela (soap opera) Rebeca, originally broadcast in Spanish, but in this version dubbed to English. I found them by chance and decided to combine the sound with a very stylized living space, giving the viewer pieces to build her own story. Visitors at the gallery were able to walk around the whole set, which had a distinctly defined front and back side.

Four small speakers, mounted on the chair and on the table, in the flower pot and at the back of the painting, were each playing a different sound loop. Their red cords were clearly visible, as were the CD players at the back of the set. When first approaching the installation, the viewer would hear all four sound loops mixed together without being able to make out separate conversations. However, when walking onto the set and getting close to either of the speakers, she would be able to hear differently themed dialogues. One character is afraid she will never be able to bear children; another just gave birth but doesn’t want the baby; a third just had a miscarriage. Should Rebeca marry Sergio, the father of Antonio whom she really is in love with? Should her sister solve her own problems by marrying a wealthy man? There is a lot of drama, all centered on love and family related issues.

The room suggests an inhabitant longing for romance, but maybe lacking the actual thing. The objects there are few and simple, revealing little of who the absent person actually is. They are props on a stage rather than traces of real life. In the same way the whole set is a cut-out, a corner of the room in which this person lives, and a set, a stage for telling a simplified story. The absent person oscillates between being Rebeca and being her viewer, active and passive, fictional character and real person. The room, even though it’s three-dimensional, is more a still, a photograph, than something “real”, where the drama of the looped dialogues repeat endlessly.

listen to the sounds: