La ventana (relato) is a collage of both archival and personal images and audio pieces that speak about the gaze and its peripheries, in terms both of semantics and affect. The piece is constructed as a written story, whereby instead of the 24 letters of the alphabet, the artist works with audiovisual “samples”. At the same time, following the demands of the story, new images are created.

This is an audiovisual jumble organised according to the necessities that emerge when quick decisions must be made. The story, thus, does not follow a discursive logic, but degenerates into open subplots.

Even though this video collage follows the work that Sucari did with the collective 12 visual, it still lies within the line of work of the collective. Its characteristics are the exploration of the archive, the documentary, the television, film and video image, both the public and institutional image, and the personal one. In this piece, Jacobo Sucari has devised a conceptual game around the concepts of seeing (ver), window (ventana), glass (vidrio) and, subtly, video, as well as the concept of journey (viaje), another word which in Spanish also starts with a v.

This journey around words and vision stems from an exploration of the gaze in contemporary art: the train’s hypnotic window, the mirror’s fragmentation, the peeping Toms, the models and mock-ups, the image and its forms of genesis, up to the Marxist theory about the production/control of glass. The rules established by the artist in this video emerge from a personal investigation into the gaze as voyeurism. The four levels that structure the piece are: seeing without being seen; seeing with the security of being distant; seeing as a form of knowledge and seeing as an oracle of the future.

La ventana (relato) is a scanner and a subjective cataloguing of the modes and models of seeing. It follows the logic of visions, which, when projected by the oracle, by the cinema or by other machines, once had the capacity to effect a sort of parenthesis in our visual everyday, but now, by having become everyday themselves, have revealed how they isolate us inside a glass bubble. The spectator, a compulsive voyeur, feels distanced from the media, and visits the world from his sofa.

Jacobo Sucari, with the help of the rules he sets up for this personal game, is able to combine in this piece the patterned changes of perspective or relationship to reality, which in pre-television times were associated with the kinetic image, and which delivered the coming certainties of the collective unconscious. In a certain way, these images are made banal in order to build a no-rules model of looking.