TED Community » Gabriel Barcia-Colombo

About Me

My work focuses on memorialization and, more specifically, the act of leaving one's imprint for the next generation. I make video scultpures that emote, react or respond to the presence of the viewer. While formally implemented by natural history museums and collections (which find their roots in Renaissance era "cabinets of curiosity"), this process has grown more pointed and pervasive in the modern-day obsession with personal digital archiving and the corresponding growth of social media culture. His video sculptures play upon this exigency in our culture to chronicle, preserve and wax nostalgic, an idea which Barcia-Colombo renders visually by “collecting” human beings (alongside cultural archetypes) as scientific specimens.

Gabriel repurposes everyday objects like blenders, suitcases and cans of Spam® into venues for projecting and inserting videos of people. While making conspicuous references to Marcel Duchamps’ ‘Ready-Mades,’ he also draws from an eclectic range of other influences, from the combines of Robert Rauschenberg and the video spectacles of Aernout Mik to taxonomy texts and anatomical drawings.