Bonjour, Baudrillard. 2004
Single-channel video, 2,08 min.
Bonjour, Baudrillard reduces to its most extreme simplicity the narrative and expressive strategies of Manu Arregui’s work. Through his own recreation as a character – a resource already used in On My Own, 2003 – the artist makes a desperate confession on camera, addressing the causes and motivations of his suicidal intentions. The existential disorientation of an infographic character, endowed with humanity but displaced from the real world of humans by his own condition of being unreal, becomes possible only in the context of a postmodern society. This is how the appeal of the title makes sense to the French philosopher and postmodern sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who theorized about the condition of the real, starting not from the concept of reproduction, but from the idea of ​​simulation. For this reason, the childish protagonist of the video greets the theoretician responsible for ontological proposals capable of conferring meaning on his existence as a virtual being.