Sangre de Laguna

In collaboration with Roberto Jacoby

Performers: Fernanda Laguna and Ramón Laguna
Closed-circuit videoperformance, 5 minutes

Residencia Internacional de Artistas en Argentina, Ostende, 2007

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Hidden behind the bushes of an edenic garden, the Laughing Virgin appeared only on a TV screen placed in a dark third-floor room of the hotel, captured by a camera installed at the window. Visitors crowded that room to witness what was unfolding just a few meters away, though already displaced into a dreamlike world.

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A naked mother (Fernanda Laguna) nursed her infant son (Ramón), danced, lay down, dressed and undressed in eight original parangolés by Hélio Oiticica, hand-dyed with bright anilines. Field recordings of water, insects, and plants—gathered during the residency and composed as concrete music—layered this “artistified” reality.

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Conjuring the désœuvrement of the parangolé and the Pre-Raphaelite imaginary of an inhabited landscape, Sangre de Laguna staged a moment of love both real and ideal, intimate and aestheticized. Distant and immediate. Classical and contemporary. Sexual and chaste. A frolic in the fusion of periods and styles, echoing both Quattrocento painting and Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Maestà.

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It was five in the afternoon, already turning cold. Fernanda coughed. Ramón laughed. And soon—too soon—it was over.