The female body has been a recurrent motif in the history of art. In this video, Iván Marino approaches the physical dimension of the body, searching with his camera for every detail, and traversing a body that offers itself naked to the spectator.

The dancer Valentina Bordenave is Marino’s model in Letanías. She stoically waits for the arrival of the camera. She does not move and stands still in front of the wall. Following the poem “Canto para matar a una culebra” (Song for killing a snake) by Nicolás Guillén, a hanger on the wall shows us a dress blowing in the air. To the side, the uncovered body of the woman. Almost as if crucified, she holds a nail between her fingers, and suffers the blows of the wind against her body as well as the direct and close look of the camera.

The camera goes through the whole of her body, turning it into something abstract, flesh, skin, fragments: a nipple, the mouth, a toe... physical details that far from offering us a global picture, show us only specific moments of this body.

Whereas in other works of his, Marino focused on the relationship between the physical and the mental dimensions, in Letanías we experience the relationship between the physical and the physical. In black and white, as in Un día Bravo or Über die Kolonie, colour will here make its appearance at the end of the piece (using the same technique that he used in In the Death’s Dream Kingdom), when, through a hole in the wall, we get to see the red of the bricks. It is at this moment that the physical dimension of the woman’s body and the physical dimension of the wall enter a dialogue: skin shows the passing of time, just like the surface of the wall, and the coldness that the model shows on the outside, hides the red flesh that the bricks in the wall reveal.

Marino uses video as a space for creating pieces almost in a linguistic manner, without the need to utter a word, and resorting to classic film technique as well as to the latest post-production digital technology.