This is the second of the “hetero-self-portraits” that Crego has dedicated to a close friend of his. In this case it is Jon Andoni Goicoetxea, a “poetry labourer” who toils on words-in-freedom of a concrete, cosmic and reversist poetry, or on the scaffolding of polypoetry, to use a more general term. This is like a poetry recital in which the grain of the voice and the intensity of the performance are favoured, to the detriment of the intelligibility of the word. Based on readings/recitations in front of the camera, recorded in open spaces, shots are stratified, overlaid and assembled such that a poetry of words becomes a poetry of sounds, and the documentary portrait dissolves within the density of a prismatic and abstract conception.
In the first hetero-self-portrait, of 1989, the profession of the poet also known as “Goiko” was not the most highlighted aspect of the piece; but rather, it was the poet’s affable and wholehearted personality, so that the camera’s approach to him was both intimate and affectionate, in contrast to the constrictions imposed by the formal and aleatory construction of the piece. In that work, Crego applied the technique -also present in some of his other videos- of overrecording on certain parts of the tape, overlapping shots with others that temporally succeed the former. With such a process he achieves an unpremeditated and aleatory edition-on-camera. We are thus in the presence of a volatile and disorderly memory, in which fissures and recurrences from the different recorded sequences clutter over each other.
In the second hetero-self-portrait, made ten years later, the previous aleatory principle has been replaced by equivalent mechanisms using digital editing software to reorganise (disarrange, rearrange) the camera recordings. In overlapping some clips with others on different tracks, the overlapping of the layers plays -also in a somewhat arbitrary manner, following a controlled randomness- with the relative transparency that each of the layers is assigned, and so produces a dense flow of overprints, encrustings and electronic textures, with an overwhelming polyphony of up to five voices. This piece is thus a memory, a cumulative portrait of different moments and juxtaposed poetic lightning flashes.