Eamon Ore-Giron
Bite Work
Eamon Ore-Giron’s new commissioned video project Bite Work is an experimental genre-breaking video that is part-performance, part-conceptual and part-comical addressing issues of mediation, surveillance, and trust. The main characters in the video wear traditional dance masks of “La Chonguinada” rituals from Peru and attempt to dance while being bitten by trained attacked dogs. Through this act, the dogs simultaneously become sculptural obstacles and dancers. The trained dogs, Belgian Malinois, have become the new darling and weapon for both the US military, Border Patrol, and US law enforcement in their fight against terrorism and illegal immigration; and well known recently for being the dogs that helped capture and kill Osama Bin Laden. The musical narrative for the video is free-form cumbia music composed by the artist and members of the Los Angeles-based band OJO that mixes hints of cumbia with electronic and ambient sounds. The video captures encounters between cultural memory and trauma by using both ritual and performance, yielding the appearance and disappearance of a hallucinatory narrative into a psychological sound experiment.