Belchite-South Bronx

the long version

Torres videotaped in the abandoned village of Belchite in northeastern Spain, which was virtually destroyed in 1937 in a major battle of the Spanish Civil War. The artist also videotaped in New York's South Bronx, an urban battlefield scarred by peacetime destruction, which has become increasingly dead and abandoned with intermittent outbursts of violence. The installation consists of an environment of highly stylized ruins depicting both sites and including tenement buildings, a bombed-out church, a basketball court, and the shell of an automobile. Torres has also produced a self-contained, single-channel videotape on this subject. The theoretical premise for Belchite/South Bronx is that the difference between war and peace exists only on statistical and rhetorical levels.