Carmen Amengual, On the Trail Rack of Modernity (Leaning My Head), 2018

On the Trail Rack of Modernity (Leaning My Head) is a two channel sound piece that plays with the litererary trope of the oracular message. The piece was inspired by some gothic moments of Shakespeare’s plays, Richard III’s line “My kingdom for a horse,” and by the poem “Cadáveres” by Argentinian activist and poet Néstor Perlongher.

Horses and corpses are key in the imagery of the Apocaliptic. In historical terms, the weaponization of the horse played a fundamental role in the technology of war that made the colonial project in the Americas possible. Tracing a line from the origins of Modernity (Shakespeare) to the “corpses” of Argentinian dictatorship, the piece articulates distant times and histories of imperial ventures, neoliberal politics, and destruction.

Investigating the aesthetics of oracular language and its interpretative ambiguity, the piece is presented as a riddle in which the meaning of the two words pronounced in simoultaneity is left to be solved by the audience.

This piece was presented in the exhibition The Ages at the artist-run space Dread Lounge, Los Angeles, in 2018.