Sin-Cadenas.tube is an audiovisual installation in which a live concert is performed with a "home theater" setting which includes a TV. It is an allegory of the sounds, images and objects present in every Venezuelan home for more than twenty years and the feelings of desperate helplessness that arise in this situation in more than half of the population of a whole country: a television with the image of President Chávez and his endless voice, in what is known as "cadenas" (chains), following similarly with his successor Maduro until today.

When "chains" are imposed, all television and radio signals remain connected to the same official broadcast for countless hours every day. In election times and until the last moment before the vote, the channels function as official electoral propaganda exceeding the regulations of the National Electoral Council, which represents an abominable advantage of media coverage over opposition parties, with the excuse that they are official announcements.

In Sin-Cadenas.tube, Chávez's iconographic and oral omnipresence in the media, constantly interrupting regular programs at peak audience hours, is counteracted with a recording of the verbal and rapid song of a woman (Lennys Astorga), using religious phrases (fanaticism versus fanaticism) and the live performance of diatonic scales of the guitar anchored to the metronome that, connected through a laptop with the Max/Jitter software, gradually affect the image of the televised "chain" in real-time. It is a live video-graphic creation, paraphrasing Andy Warhol's pop art with his aesthetic visual interference of the high media images of Marilyn Monroe, Mao, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, among many others:

Andy Warhol pop-art examples:


The installation becomes an artistic protest within the series of the author of his concert-installations "Imprisonments", as a metaphor for the current practice through the YouTube platform, where personal videos abound without possible censorship of the Venezuelan government, as a naive alternative to the need for freedom of expression and to be able to select whatever one wants to see through the media, already prisoners of other commercial and ideological interests.

Little by little, the Chávez government has been replacing commercial media with government media. The reality of the country has been completely reconstructed by a media curtain manipulated accordingly for the need to cover unwanted information such as corruption scandals, disasters in the oil industry, for example, and there is no way to know what is true and what is not, but through the sea of misinformation on the Internet, where, due to its vast mistrust, we also find ourselves completely lost. We are shipwrecked in an ocean of information, floating adrift in a desert of lies.

In Sin-Cadenas.tube, three themes are used that represent the fanaticism of Venezuelan culture in the eyes of a person in the street and in television, as they are the media heroes within a controlled Orwellian thought: baseball, misses and youth orchestras, all dressed up with the Venezuelan flag in a mirage pride painted with mass banality.

The rejection shouted rudely by Chávez against the United States ("the empire"), our main client in the oil industry on which we depend for millions in revenues, is contrasted by these same three aspects of Venezuelan culture, which all come from the USA, and in the case of Dudamel and the youth orchestras, his fame has been fueled by being a conductor in Los Angeles, an icon of capitalist success with the Rolex stamp of approval.

Of all the abusive, violent, and vulgar material used by Chávez in his countless appearances on television, video recordings were selected from his aggressive reaction to the first time he lost an electoral process in the referendum to change the Constitution for a completely communist version in 2007. The fanaticism of his figure promoted by media insistence, a result of propaganda and "chains" among other official programs such as the program "Aló Presidente" every Sunday, reached the level of praising him as a semi-God by the other half of the nation, being a leader that exerts an unforgivably rude communication during all public hours, flooding our cultural dignity, our space at home, our home and family becoming a media prison of violence and vulgarity.

Set-up: