Mario García Torres talks about his work
Saturday, February 9, 2019Translation:
Hello, my name is Mario García Torres and I wanted to talk for a moment about one of my pieces, titled ¿Alguna vez has visto la nieve caer? It’s a slideshow, an audiovisual project, and relatively long—it lasts one hour—and it’s a piece that forms part of a much wider body of work, part of research I did that has to do with a hotel that an artist had in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the 1970s. Everything began when I became quite intrigued with why this Italian artist, Alighiero Boetti, had a hotel in a place as far away as Afghanistan. And this set me on the path to the investigation, which created a number of pieces, one of which, probably the most complex, you could say, is ¿Alguna vez has visto la nieve caer? To make this piece I proposed that I would look for this hotel, and at that moment, it was understood that the hotel had been destroyed in the late 70s when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. And I started to search, I didn’t think it was interesting to go to Afghanistan to look for it physically, so I set out looking for the hotel in photographs of Afghanistan, the neighborhood where the hotel supposedly was, historic photographs and photographs published on the internet in recent years. ¿Alguna vez has visto la nieve caer? is really the narrative in which I explain what it was that happened and how it had results that were contradictory to what was believed at the time. I hope you like it. Bye.