13—14.05.2022
My Goals Are Bigger Than Yours: Vernissage Carmen Dusmet Carrasco
Borrowed Voices (2022)
12 min, six-speaker sound installation
Walking through Carmen Dusmet Carrasco’s spatial six-speaker sonic installation Borrowed Voices, one is immersed into a monologue interior that blurs and seeps into a rhetorical and ironic dialogue, echoing the ‘thinking process’ as labor itself. Carefully scripted personal writings are merged with collected and borrowed fragments, ranging from Twitter and podcasts to various inspirational texts and song lyrics. Carmen’s sonic scape brazenly distills from these intertextual sources a reverie of looped and confessional voices that echo our intimate and collective encounters with modes of procrastination, self-questioning, and doubt.
The Swimming Pool (2020)
Documentary, 45 min, HD
The film is an intimate portrait of a mother-daughter relationship through the eye of a camera. The mother is selling clothes on street markets in Southern Spain. The daughter is pursuing a design master degree in Amsterdam. And what, between these things, is the difference? It’s a rhetorical question because there may be no real difference. Mother drives a Ford van with the bright coloured street market clothes in them, while she moves from job to job, gig to gig, trying her luck at job applications, living from day to day, and hand to mouth.
The Swimming Pool was developed over the course of a two-year domestic ethnographic research involving many travels to Southern Spain. In an attempt to find what it means to practice care, Carmen Dusmet Carrasco developed an obsession with capturing her mother’s precarious journey towards retirement. What began as a socio-economic study of female poverty in Spain led to an intimate negotiation of a mother-daughter relationship.
Projecting the imagination of a younger generation onto a future that is unfolding, the film is an intergenerational prism. In its rawness, it unapologetically poses a confessional question: How can younger generations take care of the elderly while safeguarding their own future?
Carmen Dusmet (b.1991)
is a Spanish graphic designer & visual artist based in The Hague. Her work explores practices of care through design. She is interested in co-creating collaborative methodologies of making and thinking, with the subjects she works with. Beginning from personal experiences, she focuses on how socio-economic structures affect individual and collective identities. Through collaborations, video, graphic design, sound, and text, her work speaks of self-representation, identity, labour, family and intergenerational debt. She understands her work as a contemplating lens of an uncertain future; a tool to observe— and reflect on —the unpredictability of survival, growing up, ageing, change and hope. Currently, she co-runs Home Cinema, an online temporary video broadcast that responds to the question: what can we see together now that we cannot see each other?
My Goals Are Bigger Than Yours
This project is part of Season #5 in Off the, Grid: My Goals Are Bigger Than Yours, organized by artists David Ghelli Santuliana, Valentino Russo, Cathleen Owens, Carmen Dusmet Carrasco & Arthur Cordier.