Carlos Amorales

b. 1970, Mexico / Netherlands

The word ‘cascara’, when translated, literally means ‘peel’, but in Mexican Spanish it also means the sort of football that people play in the streets – an improvised sort of football match between a few people. In the work Cascara, two people play football on a waste ground amongst the rubble left after the demolition of a building. Instead of using an ordinary ball they use a plastic skull.

The way the video is filmed, and the straightforward way it is presented, gives the viewer a very physical sensation, a dizzy feeling, which involves the viewer in the action. With this video I wanted to create an image that, beyond the reality of the action, also functions as a metaphor for the impact all the major political events of the last years have had on me, all the death and destruction. I think the video, because it makes fun of death in a sort of way, is a kind of exorcism. It is a way for me to get rid off all those heavy impressions, the burden they are on me, who lived most of the war events through the filter of the media as a sort of gothic story in which I felt trapped beyond my will.

The video is simple: it has no editing, nor any narrative, but it suggests the action that has happened and is happening in many places in the world. Somewhere soldiers from a foreign army are playing football with the skull of a local old regime; somewhere civilians are playing football with the remains of their own history.

(Text: imagine limerick catalogue, 2004)