This work documents the 1999 Argentine presidential inauguration of Fernando de la Rúa through a single, unrelenting close-up: the president’s right hand as it mechanically shakes the hands of foreign dignitaries, politicians, and symbolic figures. Over one hour of real time, the camera fixates solely on the hand—its gestures, tensions, and fleeting intimacies—transforming a ceremonial ritual into a disquieting study of political theater. What initially reads as a choreography of unity and diplomacy slowly devolves into a harbinger of rupture, foreshadowing the catastrophic economic collapse of 2001 under de la Rúa’s administration.
This work excavates the anatomy of failure encoded in a ritual. By reducing a nation’s fate to the repetitive clutch of a single hand, it asks: When does a gesture of solidarity become an omen of betrayal? De la Rúa’s hand, suspended in a frame without context, becomes a grotesque monument—not to power, but to its unraveling.