Canción de la Armonía y el Mundo

Marta De Gonzalo | Publio Pérez Prieto


This is a domestic music video based on a song by the same title, laced with a subtle irony. A poem with allusions to neatness and the impossibility of an immaculate cleanliness is articulated in the play of images of various instants and details of the home. There is always some noise, some dust, some blood, some fingerprints. The video references the cleanliness idealised by education and society, a cleanliness that it is always impossible to achieve totally, but which remains the aspiration of a world that is dirty and filled with inequality, and hopes to erase every single trace of the body, of memory and of feelings.

Inscribed within the swinging cadence of the everyday are moments lost in parallel thought, in which noises seep through. Dirt creeps up from the breach that is opened between boredom and obligation. A powerful and subtle thought, invisible for all the others, that internally distorts the everyday. We perceive that nothing is as it should be, that there are stains in the necessarily spotless.

Dust floats above well-ordered books, clothes go round and round in the washing machine, a child is being bathed, a shadow reflected on the television goes out of focus, the fan, more dust, a clock, sinks, drops of blood, surfaces with fingerprints.

By means of skillfully worked intimate images of the domestic habitat the authors present a fable about cleanliness as an imposed rule. The song about harmony is a warning against the creation of a social unity as the only rule of evolution. The piece describes an aseptic and well ordered society in which laws have disappeared, energies are green and there is no apparent reason for animosity. It describes a world that seems to be perfect and that has been built at the expense of any trace of humanity. This is a perfection that stains. The paradox of a society that has ceased to believe in equality, that is engaged in erasing its intimate traces in body, memory and feeling, instead of thinking about the filth of its order.

Within the format of a music video, with a slow tempo, common moments are organised into sequences that make up the synchronic and rhythmic structure of the shots of home details during a period of time. The different voices and instruments (bass and the rhythm of teeth brushing), create a feeling of redundancy, restriction, humanity and natural order, which is broken by the impossibility of subtle disorders. This song about harmony and the world, ironically formulated from within a positive attitude, becomes a proposal to peacefully assume everyday chaos.

Technical datasheet

  • Title: Canción de la Armonía y el Mundo
  • Direction: Marta De Gonzalo - Publio Pérez Prieto
  • Production: Becas de Arte Caja Madrid. 2004.
  • Duration: 00:09:40
  • Languages: Spanish
  • Subtitles: English
  • Original format: DV-Cam
  • Formats: Betacam Digital - DVD
  • TV systems: PAL
  • License: Copyright