){kind=link}
Saṃsāra, 2009
Saṃsāra, 2009-today
Site-specific Art Installation. Marble and digital system (Real Time Clock/Calendar) designed and programmed specifically for this piece.
50 x 70 x 20 cm approx. (Limited Edition: 1/3).
Work in Progress.
Exhibited exhibited for the first time in an old and abandoned cloister of the Santa Clara Convent, Havana. 10th Havana Biennial.
Anthropology and New Media Art (Digital Art)
‘Saṃsāra’ is a work that starts from the ethics of the mystical discourse of the traditions that assume the process of existence as constant deaths and new births, new genesis in which man himself constitutes his own demiurge. On these bases Samsara proposes other reflections around the temporal continuum to speak of a a possible reality on the margins of the course, among other discursive levels. By means of a system with digital programming, Ernesto Benítez exposes autobiographical elements related to his condition as an artist and his main aesthetic statements…
‘Saṃsāra’ is a work conceived as a digital environmental installation (environmental art) designed for a specific space (site-specific art-installation) that describes a history of scissions, renunciation and decay; of detachment, resignation, death and emptiness. A history of retreat and cloister: a history of resigned anguish and uncertainty about the future. “SaMsara” is the forgetfulness as a life story: it is the oblivion of our own dismemory…. It is, in short, a metaphor around the spiritual emptiness and describes the tedium, the tendency to disaffection and non-commitment experienced by man in the modernity context of the neo-medieval digital society.
Self-referentially, the context and the Cuban reality, in the existential plane, are here stated. This piece is born from the resignation with which the feeling of a-temporality and the existential anguish caused by living in a parallel and static reality, stopped… “samsaric”, from which, at the end -inevitably- we must escape”