ESPAÑABCDE is an audiovisual piece by the artist Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, created based on the instructions of Letter Piece 3 by Matthew Shlomowitz. In it, Adolfo Suárez, Felipe González, José María Aznar, José Luis Zapatero and M. Rajoy follow the composer’s instructions in different situations of enunciation (speeches, interviews, statements, replies) and across various spatial settings, offering an experience of body and sound around the word that unites them and that also seems to unite us: Spain.

In ESPAÑABCDE, the presidents of the Spanish government become performers, stepping outside the game of political fiction to create a political work through the play of the beat. A dreamlike YouTuber-style cut-up that opens up multiple reflections on the problem of the association body-identity-voice-message-purity that Derrida called the “metaphysics of presence”: during the three and a half minutes of the piece, we witness a continuous dissociation between the image and sound of the presidents. ESPAÑABCDE allows us to rest from struggles over meaning through rhythm, offering a space to think outside of fullness, an existence shaped by the interference of repetition that proves capable of dismantling lexical-semantic agreements. A glitch where subjects and political meanings dissolve through the simplicity of their distortion.