La Verdad Es Una Excusa
4:42
2007
La verdad es una excusa talks about art, its language of communication and the interlocutors involved in the discourse, but it also talks about issues that concern us outside the realm of art itself, such as identification with a specific and determined identity, memory and its links with reality, the rhythm of failure… and the cadence and constancy of shipwreck.
For Ampudia, there is no incontrovertible truth and everything, both our belief system and our memory of the recent or distant past, even our perceptions and observations, respond to a conceptual deception: there is no such thing as truth, but rather a point of view, a position with respect to reality. Hence, truth changes with just a simple shift in the devices of reality.
The video La verdad is an excuse, through the simple mechanism of reversing the direction of the film projection, to “return” the Spanish exiles of the Civil War to their own side of the border, bringing them back home before our eyes and highlighting, in a greater and bloodier way, the cruelty of their historical fate and their parallel brotherhood with contemporary exiles. The lame walk backwards, children drink the tears from their eyes, French guards recover a fallen or overturned car, and the Le Perthus pass reintegrates into Spain Spaniards who never ceased to be so.
On the ground, mechanical instruments, robots halfway between a gun and a toy car, “mash up”, in the artist’s words, phrases from Hölderlin’s Hyperion – that boy devastated by war and human nature: ‘The waves of the heart would not burst into such beautiful foam, nor would they become spirit, if they did not collide with destiny, that old silent rock.’
