This 16:02 min video begins with the reconstructed voice of a Uruguayan rugby player who crashed in the Andes in 1972. He describes the design, construction and use of the team’s emergency beds inside the fuselage of the wreckage. Images, sound and text from archives, mass media and personal notebooks make space for viewers to cohabit these beds, to partake in the imaginative composition that they create. The protagonist elaborates upon the methods that the boys improvised, drawing on an example: a contemporary alphabet fashioned out of jockstraps. This cliché of homosexual identification helps express the different contexts that the boys find themselves in (bed, plane, book).

In interjecting footage of a live televised rugby match, rain and mud disturb the clean capture and transmission of the event. Streaks from the player’s bodies are animated into smears on the video screen, activating their gestures and blurring the subsequent content for the viewers of this video.

This work is accompanied by a textile installation: an expanse of shredded red sports fabric that once made up a rugby shirt; sections of armpits, collar, tags and graphics meet the bodies of the viewers at multiple points across the installation.

Our Bed was staged as part of the exhibition Phoenix Art Space Invitation, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, August 2022 with Claire Makhlouf Carter and Nina Wakeford and was further exhibited at 6 Seville Place Gallery, Dublin, September 2022.

Excerpts were published in Modern Queers newsletter (distributed worldwide) 2022 and G & P book edition 6, Kunstverein Amsterdam, 2023 (distributed throughout Europe and North America).

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/32609