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| Casco Fredi Born in1967 in Asunción, Paraguay. Lives and works in Paraguay. Fredi Casco: The Collateral Archives Disasters of the others’ war The whole of Stroessner's dictatorship developed in the context of a split world and an intensely static bipolar scenario. A space upon which the threat of the Third World War was suspended, the absolute threat whose imminence argued for the conversion of the other into an enemy. From that irrefutable assumption, many other things were justified. The brutal regimes located in the Southern Cone, for example, represented the inevitable consequences -the collateral damages as one would say nowadays- of an extremely precarious universal harmony maintained at the very edge of the Apocalypse, or its threat, effectively fuelled by the imperial. The end of this phase, which more or less started with the Perestroika (1985) and culminated in the collapse of Russia (1991), resulted in Latin American military dictatorships not being functional any longer. During the hard times of the Cold War, the global manifesto fomenting the dictatorships maintained a disciplined system of international relations among the aligned countries. Fredi Casco selected several photos depicting the intense diplomatic activity displayed in Paraguay at that time, when, according to his sources, “there were more dignitaries and representatives performing diplomatic visits than in all of the country’s history”. The tactics Fredi Casco’s work consists of two stages: the brief apogee of Stroessner’s foreign relations and its decline. By means of minimal interventions, the artist presents the mediocre -although pretentious- display of provincial galas, organised not only in the occasion of the foreign dignitaries’ or their representative’s visits, but also in minor diplomatic receptions and royal-like small rituals. In general, these insignificant images have been rejected from the historical archive. They have, nevertheless, the indexical power of the residue: they can cover with the help of the imagination all the gaps and black holes where neither historical research nor political analysis manage to arrive. To suggest, momentarily all those meanings, accents and expressions is actually the task undertaken by the art work. Freud calls this Unheimliche, the strangeness, -meaning the imminence that suddenly disturbs an ordinary situation. The photos, the narrations Employing the double and the mask as disturbing narrative elements, Fredi Casco uses found photographs obtained in the Sunday flea market of Asunción. Since 2001 he has been collecting this kind of objet trouvé, the pictures found by chance at the antiques fair. The digitally processed photos maintain their original size (20 x 25 cms), colours and tone. Thus, only the doubles and masks act by becoming intruding elements that force the photos to refer to veiled aspects of the histories they narrate, setting in motion other scripts. The use of ordinary photographs, as well as their digital processing at home, highlights the mediocrity of the public resources; but also reveals the skill applied to an optimal fiction staged by means of affordable procedures (special “low budget” effects, as the author calls them). The Double I The concept of duality, as already known, constitutes an obsessive presence within the contemporary world. Actually, it constitutes an obsession in the horizon of any culture; yet, in our horizon it is loaded with unexpected connotations that increase its power. By itself, photography guarantees a reliability and reproducibility, never achieved before by the process of representation. Moreover, the cultural impact of biotechnology advancements nowadays ties together all duplications of the human figure with those of the clone and cyborg, hybrids that debunk the idea of an original and natural body and assign the organic reproduction of the body to other keys-players: disturbing concepts that spur the imagination and raise uncertain threats, like other versions of the Unheimliche, the Freudian concept for the sinister. When Fredi Casco duplicates the figure of specific characters who appear in the photos (referring meanwhile to the Stalinist practice of photograph forging), not only ridicules the ontological and representational scandal concerning the duplication of the figure and the multiple simulacrum. He also summons the presence of what is already present, re emphasising the position and meaning of specific actors of the dark theatre he constructs within the photos. It is not the same to duplicate the picture of an anonymous person or a loved one than to clone Stroessner: the mythical imagery arising from the era of dictatorship induces the viewer to perceive this reiteration like a nightmare: the anguish to see Stroessner like a self-mutant character, who reproduces itself, election after election, omnipresent and eternal. The offence of forging photographic reality is also added, as it alters one of the few guarantees of truth maintained by representation: to alter a photograph is to falsify reality. And if that photograph constitutes an official document, its forging is like committing forgery and fraud against public history. Duplication, thus, has serious collateral effects. The displacement produced by the twin copy of the characters, allows, on the other hand, approaching the question of identity, which becomes especially complicated in the binary times of the Cold War, when anyone or anything different was considered not only abnormal, but the enemy. The Double II In parallel to the use of the double, Casco also makes use of another resource in order to intervene the original images to provide the photographic narrative with an abrupt turn that makes the story glide away, revealing another plot. In this case, we are referring to the introduction of masks which unexpectedly cover the faces of specific characters. There are three types of masks. As if we were confronted with funerary masks the face of the carrier is duplicated, replaced by an identical fake, a spectral copy of itself. In this case, the masks are, once more, facsimile copies of the character. The second type are masks that reinforce the farce aspects of a situation like in a masquerade. The third ones are gas masks: they refer to the alien nature that the figure of the other acquires during the Cold War, the extreme intruder who exhibits the threatening non-face of discordance. Fredi Casco criticizes in parody this notion of the other as an obscured and hooded adversary, linking it, by means of a specific rhetoric, to Class B cinema. Through this movement, the direction of the threat is disoriented: the dictator and his accomplices, the dignitaries and ambassadors who pay a visit and their mediocre suite of assistants and informers are filtered by the topics of specific popular narratives of espionage and science fiction, according to the artist himself, of “ambassadors-spies, men in black and double agents”; who -veiled and obscure- take the place of the other. As in any masquerade -as in any allegorical process- everything has another meaning. Excerpt from an essay by Ticio Escobar May, 2006  Download CV |  Untitled, 2003-2005 |
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