In the heart of technology—which is just as saying Tokyo—, Abel Barroso walks down the streets talking through an atypical cell phone. (…)
The nature of the performer’s conversation is entirely apocryphal because he is not engaged in a dialogue with a specific person, since his telephone does not work. Abel is talking, provoking the context. Showing his backwardness (?) in technological matters without modesty (…)
Café Internet del Tercer Mundo (Third World Internet Café, 2000) inaugurated this tragicomic wave of installations and works having to do with the peripheral consumption of technology. But Abel’s humor allows him to turn the defect into praise and criticism goes off in all directions: to excess and lack, to domination and yielding.
In his works we can find an entire visual essay on the mechanisms of political, economic and cultural resistance in those countries that, because of diverse reasons, have been excluded from the new logics of cultural distribution and consumption (we may say periphery, although the term is considered in disuse). He does it, that’s true, with an accentuated sense of humor and a ludic will (almost all the pieces are interactive) involving in a perverse way audiences coming from all cultural logics. (…)
