This video is, once again, one of the memory exercises so characteristic of Crego. An exercise of memory, and, due to its own construction, of un/memory; the memory disorder of one specific day, on holiday, the suspended time of the artist’s summer holiday with his family (his wife, his child). The closing credits specify that filming took place in a small town, Congosto de Valdavia (Palencia), the 21st of July, 1998, a special day: the author’s 36th birthday. (The title, if the numbers are run through, makes reference to this date.) The video begins with a certain continuity as it records, in first person, the acts and places that occur when we wake up: getting up from bed, daily grooming, breakfast, walking... Gradually, the impression of the traces, the facts (quite banal) of the day, which were originally recorded linearly on a magnetic tape, are however less continuous and more disordered. The piece manages to offer us a prismatic and simultaneistic vision of time. Once again Crego creates a particular point of conjunction between the aesthetics of the home video, familiar (supposedly unkempt and casual), and an added premise of a formal and structural nature.

The idea of “loosing one’s memory” -a very common phrase- always features in Crego’s work. It is transliteralised in different ways by means of his use of video (and other media) as, precisely, an art of memory. Video allows for the recording of real time or of an unlimited series of instants, and for a subsequent formal experimentation with it. Día 13.149 is part of the first pieces of a new stage, in which, as opposed to the previous one, Crego replaces the principle, deliberately blind and forgetful, which he had applied to the domestic videocamera and to the editing done in the camera itself, and instead opts now for equivalent operations on the time line of computer editing systems which, themselves have become part of the appliances of our domestic audiovisual life. Thus, in superimposing video clips on top of each other on different tracks, the mantle of these layers annuls or erases the visibility of the previous/inferior ones and introduces time leaps.