Text samlung Goetz

The story in The Man with the Bag is presented as a symbol or a way to assimilate human existence or its ability to synthesize, in an almost baroque way, reality and fiction, past or present and narrative and abstract characterizes the act of looking carefully around us. In this Sebastian Diaz Morales joins together six, very similar episodes (The Man with the Bag, 2004). In all of these, a man runs through the barren and desolate landscape of Patagonia. His efforts to move forward are hindered by the sack he is carrying. In each episode, he stumbles, losing the bag's contents — sometimes bones, sometimes stones — and he even leaves the sack by the wayside, only to continue his journey later from the same spot. The man who carries this bag full of bones always stumbling over the same stone, hence departs from the perception that the artist has from Patagonia, its place of origin, and the need to build on that re-conquered territory, a mythical dimension from which to return to see reality back in its raw shape.   The video is at the end, an allegory: a fiction under which what we see symbolizes something else. The landscape from which there seems to be no escape suggests, rather, an image of fears and phobias, of which the protagonist flees as well as the split screen refers to other dividing lines to undertake, closer to obstacles, personal boundaries and decisions. The burden the man carries and never rids himself of makes him seem like a modern day Sisyphus, one condemned to the eternal repetition of a futile activity.