In the last fifteen years, the videos of Marcelo Expósito have been shown in numerous festivals, workshops, screenings, seminars, conferences and exhibitions in different countries. Some of the most important screenings have been: Aperto (Biennale di Venezia, 1993), World Wide Video Festival (1992, 1994), Desmontaje (IVAM, 1993), Time and Tide (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1993), Pour un nouveau narrateur (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1993), Señales de Vídeo (MNCARS, 1995-97), Non Place Urban Realm (South London Gallery, London, 1999), Procesos documentales (Barcelona, 2001), Antagonismos (MACBA, Barcelona, 2001), 3rd Berlin Biennial (2004), Cine o casi cine (MNCARS, 2004), Marx Update (El Ojo Atómico, Madrid, 2004), Cinéma du réel (París, 2005), Spectacle, Pleasure Principle or The Carnavalesque? (Shedhalle, Zurich, 2005), If it's too bad to be true... it could be Disinformation (ApexArt, NY, 2005), From Mini-FM to Hacktivists: A Guide to Art and Activism (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zeland, 2005), Disobedience (Play-Gallery, Berlin, 2005), La hipótesis imaginativa (Espais, Girona, 2005), The People's Choice (Isola Art Center, Milan, 2006), Self-Education (National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2006), Remapping Mozart (Vienna, 2006), Cities from Below (Pisa, 2006) and a long etcetera.
For the past twenty years (exactly since Bideoaldia took place in Tolosa in 1987) I have been working within lines of activity that combine critical writing, organising and curating meetings, festivals and other type of events, teaching and participating in seminars, publishing, work production on different formats (video, installation, publications...). I nevertheless think of my activity as a whole, as that of an artist who has extracted from the legacy of the historical avant-garde conclusions, somewhat unkind, about the history and the institution of art: that one can (sometimes one must) make art that “does not seem to be art”, that the introduction of the communication paradigm, the collective dimension and the principle of utility, into the work of art, radically break with classic modes of doing, and that overlappings and concatenations between artistic and political machines are rather the rule than the exception in the avant-garde tradition (like it or not).
During the 1990s my activity diversified into curatorship and the organisation of different activities (maily focused on video, mail-art, experimental/industrial music and other formats that back then were not yet overcodified), as well as into a variety of formats, influenced, I think, at times somewhat naively, by my own personal top ten: critical postmodernism, institutional critique, site-specificity, feminism, politicised and experimental traditions in modern cinema, and of course, video work by artists and by political groups of the 60s and 70s. More recently, especially since I became increasingly involved with the activity of certain social movements, since the civil disobedience cycle in Spain in the second half of the nineties, the zapatista big bang and the tormentous outburst of the global movement in 1999/2000, I have applied all my efforts to strengthen, in whatever way possible, the creation of new machines for the overlapping of art, politics and activism, as this is the way that art can contribute to the construction of the collective imaginary and processes of social change. I am also irremediably convinced that the only possible way to recuperate the (highly abused) avant-garde principle “art/life” is to work hard for an art that is nothing else than an innovative construction of oneself. I think these are some of the ways of producing happy life in a world that is pretty revolting.
