Saṃsāra (Environmental Art)
2009
Marble and electronic system with digital programming of RTC: Real Time Clock/Calendar.
New media environmental Installation of variable dimensions.
50 x 70 x 20 cm. each piece.
Ed-3.
This work was produced in collaboration with the ICID (Central Institute of Digital Research) and the CUJAE (Technological University of Havana).
Special thanks:
CUJAE:
Engineers Sergio Pérez (in memoriam), Reynier Torres, Mailen Sarmientos, Alejandro Cabrera, Adel Fernández and Daniel Pérez.
ICID:
Engineers Lino Reboredo, Angel Díaz Lezcano, Eduardo Rodríguez. Yamile González Gil and Sandra Cepero.
SaMsara: The forgetfulness as life story
Saṃsāra proposes a metaphor around the solitude of confinement, death and spiritual emptiness from what is known as life story. It intends to reflect on the tendency to retreat or self-enclosure generated by the uncertainty of the future. It is a work that reflects on resignation, incommunication and its inherent feeling of existential anguish. As a Cuban, self-referentially, this work discusses isolation and the absence of options or alternatives of which we witness, immutable, the advance of time waiting “we do not know what” … perhaps a new incarnation or inevitably our own resurrection?
By means of programmed digital plates, in this work Ernesto Benítez exposes autobiographical elements related to his condition as an artist and his main aesthetic postulates. So Saṃsāra describes a common history of scissions, renunciation and depauperation; a history of disaffection, dissent, death and emptiness; a history of retreat and cloisters. A history of resigned anguish and uncertainty about the future. It is oblivion as a life story: a story proscribed by History; SaMsara is, in short, a metaphor for the oblivion of our own dis-memory.