Maya Watanabe
El Contorno
El Contorno by Maya Watanabe is a three-channel video installation that features five actors performing a script—at times individually and at times in unison—choreographically moving across an indistinct urban space. As the view shifts from one performer to another we notice that they are all in close proximity and that the feed from all three channels was simultaneously filmed. The scene unravels with actors moving in and out of view in an elaborate negotiation between their bodies and the camera’s movements. As the title suggests, Watanabe plays with the concept of outlines: between individual actors and a collectively performed script, and between what is left inside and outside of the cinematic frame. As the footage from each channel bleeds from one to the other, Watanabe revokes any fixed notion of identity and space, reformulating them as elements with diffuse boundaries. In El Contorno narration becomes a fragmented map of ideas, space becomes a context without references, and identity becomes a flexible state of being.