The promise of what is yet to come
Leaving behind any nostalgia for the past and with no expectation for the future, Derzu Campos’ work explores the relation between the continuity of history and that of our previous narratives. Navigating through historic and temporary conjunctures that anxiously interrogate fate, his installations and images create an atemporal imagery: post-apocalyptic scenarios that evoke haunting phantasms or schisms, confronting us with the broken promise of our once utopian landscapes. But this acknowledgment is as much a recognition of failure as it is a reminder of the impulse and energy that once made us believe in it.
His work seems to be asking: how to configure the past in order to renew the way we envisage the future? How to imagine that future without forgetting all that once occurred? How to picture the pass of time upon the world and yet embrace the possibility of transformation?
His installations often comprise of videos, photography and other miscellaneous objects which seem to belong elsewhere in time, distort the way history is portrayed, blurring and glitching historical narratives and architectural landmarks so to offer a panorama where science fiction and reality are blurred into a speculative new world. In this way, his works act in resistance to history, (whether they are read as a projection of the future, or a reflection of the past) speculative fictions filled with political force, aware that they are looking for a transformation so to offer some leverage to history.
In the end, his work interrogates fate but it also seems to provide an answer: that of the promise of what is yet to come. The inevitability of “l’avenir”. Campos bets on the speculation of continuity of history that, in turn, hopes to be transfigured for the future.
Helena Lugo, 2017