BA: And impeding the anticipation on the part of the viewer that either the objects will serve as a footnote to the film or the film will be a footnote for the objects. Speaking of objects, Bulto (2011) was made not for Mexico, but for Lima, Peru. How important was it to the genesis of the piece that this was occurring in Lima? MS: I wanted to translate that feeling of a big Latin American city to another big Latin American city. Bulto is a certain phantasma of a phenomenon that would happen in Latin America, not necessarily only in Lima. Bulto goes back to the fardos funerarios, which are the cloths that a dead body would be wrapped in and then buried in, particularly in Peru. Bulto came from these ideas that the object would contain a body somehow. The shape is like a ham, a body, or an occult thing. BA: It’s almost weaponlike too. Every time I’ve traveled to Mexico or South America, I’ve always been amazed at what people try to travel with. MS: (Laughs) Exactly, yeah. These huge amounts of god-knows-whatthey-are, televisions. And those are bultos, mysterious packages. BA: I saw someone getting on a plane with a refrigerator, and he couldn’t bring the refrigerator on as a carry-on. It was a little fridge, but still . . . MS: It all has to do with commerce: things are cheaper to buy here than in Mexico. BA: Even in your earliest works, there was a deliberate slippage between commerce and psychology. In Orange Lush (1995), the objects have these psychological residences—you let them have the weird, phallic, vaginal strangeness of these objects. But then you’re like, well, these objects also aren’t made in South America: they’re made in Asia. You like working in the place where the psychological and economic collide. MS: The Bulto is specifically psychological baggage—it’s this thing that nobody wants, but it’s this thing you can’t get rid of because it always comes back to you. That’s why the Bulto is this circulating thing. Nobody knows or questions what the hell it is, but it’s a burden. BA: And you have to deal with it while it’s there. A favorite scene is when the kids dump it in a trash pile, and then someone goes and picks it up. Melanie Smith with Rafael Ortega Bulto: Fragments, 2011, video still 16
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