El teatro de la desaparición

The first part is like a postcard from a realm almost too surreal to be true, a study of daily life in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea flecked with such unusual details that not all of them can be real. The second part manipulates time, a wordless portrait of clay vessels being produced in Morocco that slows down and speeds up without warning, imbuing unspectacular actions with detachment and wonder. The third part distorts space, a hand camera tour that moves through apparently connected locations as if carrying out a single movement, although these industrial facilities, cityscapes, meadows and exhibition spaces are not side by side but scattered across the globe. Each part looks different from the others, but the interests are the same: to probe the earth and bring its riches to the surface, to catalogue the fragments of beauty and tension carried up with the soil, to show that how and what you see are one and the same. If all the world’s a stage, then these are its actors: spiders, falling rocks, massage appliances, digging machines, exposed concrete, pigs snout to snout; there’s no leading role in the theatre of disappearance.