Salvamento e Socorrismo

Antón Reixa
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Using his own poems as a starting point, Antón R. Reixa sifts through culture by means of the Galician language. An obfuscated journey through the waste in a performative research on technology from philology and music.

"I came to video with the primary idea of illustrating some poems".

A procession of large canvases advances, guided by an ambulance, along the motorway. While Antón R. Reixa, somewhere between orator and haranguist in a beret and decorated overalls, exhorts his poems in a scrapyard. In turn, different performative sequences are interspersed with the author and Os Resentidos as protagonists: showered with honey; fervent speeches with a megaphone; "All for the wrench! "a short story of attraction and scatology of a couple in a fashionable bar (and its urinals): "isto e un poema de amor" with postmodern coldness; a street show about smoking a cigarette observed by the people of the city and the Pharisees of some film; an irradiating ode, "radiación residual radiation... TRIS TRAS... choivas radioactivas..."; Reixa's declamations between a road and an empty theatre, with a dead court. The different poems are laced with musical moments. The procession continues and it is Os Resentidos who move the paintings of Menchu Lamas and Antón Patiño. When they settle in a rubbish dump, the performative video, as a relation of poems in images, is transformed into a video clip of Os Resentidos in the rubbish dump. In parallel, Reixa himself enters a sarcophagus of grape rays, regional dances and the theme "Abdul" (vente pa Europa) closing the video.

"Salvamento e socorrismo" was considered by critics at the time as "the best illustration of texts in video that has been made in Spain... different (and contemporary) to the literary adaptations of cinema" and shocked the model imposed by MTV when it came to making video clips in this country. Nor did the group, Os Resentidos, make conventional pop music. Its vocalist, Antón R. Reixa, professor of Galician philology at the time and award-winning poet, combined different elements of the art of the moment in this radioactive cocktail. As a great showman of the video, Antón R. Reixa recites his poetry before a constant shout of "ZAS", a kind of whip crack, which marks the rhythm and his pauses. A point of union between phrases that serves to resolve the aesthetic entanglements between the scrapping of culture and the ruins of futurism seasoned by a punk Dadaism and spiced by its altered logics, repetitions and echoes that respond. This video is one of the critical insignias with the aestheticist postmodernity of the moment, fleeing from the glam conventions of the country towards the art thurmix.

"Os silencios dos cemiterios ZAS..." (The silences of the cemeteries ZAS...)

Technical datasheet

  • Title: Salvamento e Socorrismo
  • Direction: Antón Reixa
  • Production: Videoesquimal. 1985.
  • Duration: 00:36:00
  • Original format: U-Matic
  • Formats: Betacam Digital - DVD
  • TV systems: NTSC - PAL
  • License: Copyright