Los Voluble
’92 Ends it All
From 7pm to 8pm
The New Year’s Eve TV special was hosted by the comic duo Martes y Trece, under the title El 92 cava con todo (’92 Ends it All). In one of its sketches, the comics simulated a lottery draw: the winning numbers — 19 and 92 — were pulled out of a cement mixer to mock the grandiose works carried out in Barcelona for the Olympics. The Kingdom of Spain looked to recover its colonial past, celebrating five hundred years since Cristopher Columbus’s arrival in what is known today as Antilles, in the Caribbean. Thus, the Olympics joined in with the celebrations of the fifth centenary of the Discovery of America, as did the Universal Exhibition of Seville in 1992 and Madrid as the European Capital of Culture. Spain wanted to be modern without shaking off the imperial past it was still dragging behind. The events of that year cost taxpayers 180 million euros, a debt the country incurred from European banks, foreshadowing the role of debt in the international economy with States’ loss of autonomy with banks. Today, the ruins of Expo ’92 and the Barcelona Olympics still linger.
On this occasion, experimental duo Los Voluble put forward an audiovisual and sound exploration which reflects on 1992 and its implications in the cultural, social and political sphere of the country, drawing from archive material, electronic music and live cinema.
Los Voluble is brothers Pedro and Benito Jiménez, who, since 1996, have developed audiovisual experimentation projects and sound activism in multiple formats. Flamenco, noise, rap, electoral announcements, Holy Week, advertising and home movies make their sessions a complex framework of digital folk assembled with analogue instruments. Most of the time they work from audiovisual interpretation, political remix videos and collaborations with other artists such as bulos.net, Raúl Cantizano, Niño de Elche and Rocío Márquez. They have released their work on Mexican net label Música para Espías and distributed it through Telegrama Cultural. They inhabit ZEMOS98 and their work is under public domain. Listen to them on SoundCloud.