Pez is a piece of digital animation that presents us a futurist world in which humans live under the water and spend their lives looking at a fish.
This work is about the absurdity of life, the impossiblity of getting out of the exhausting routines of the everyday, waking up, getting dressed in the hybrid suit, putting on the helmet, looking at one fish with your partner, seeing it swim and sleep (or cryopreserve). Cabaleiro continues here with his minimalist aesthetic of white spaces, little communication and techno music.
In this piece we are able to make sense of the cosmos that Cabaleiro constructs with his videos, as we can appreciate a lot of the same features that will later appear separately in other works of his. He mixes his obsession with understanding the irrationality and triviality of everyday life with his fascination for certain objects like the helmet, the cyborg or, in this case, fish. These, with their short memory, are introduced as a metaphor for our own little capacity for retaining all the information that we consume. In an era characterized by the quick use of everything, the capacity to remember is an uncomfortable appendage left behind from a previous stage of evolution. Something which now is a nuissance, as it is neither possible nor necessary to remember all that one sees, hears or reads.
On the other hand, Cabaleiro’s characters spend their time simply and purely observing, just seeing without necessarily understanding what they see. Visual consumption thus becomes an apolitical exercise, an unconscious action: to absorb information without processing it. This work again deals with Cabaleiro’s perception of the evolution of contemporary human beings.
Technical development: Eva Mendoza, Antón Cabaleiro