Simo

Jordi Colomer asked the actress Pilar Rebollar to stage the scene that she had described to him ten years before when the two of them were in a lift in the Urbis apartment hotel in Valencia. An eight-storey hotel, with three identical apartments on each floor, where the company performing La Marquesa Rosalinda at the nearby Rialto theatre was staying. In the lift, Pilar Rebollar, who was playing the part of a menina, pressed the button for the sixth floor with the end of her folding umbrella. On the way up, she told Colomer about her nightly adventure in the apartment: as she was very short, she had to open the drawers in the wardrobe and climb up them like stairs to hang her coat up, to get up onto a stool to take her make-up off in front of the mirror and to climb on the sofa to open the window. Her apartment, identical to all the others, was a barrier to her.

Simo, made in 1997, is the film of this staging. The year before, Colomer had started working with the video format, which allowed him to introduce narrative, fiction and the human figure. Simo, the artist’s first video installation, was premiered in a projection room built inside MACBA. As he puts it, “The idea of forging a cannon of the human figure through a system of harmonic proportions and constructions has had a prominent role in Western culture, from the Greek kuroi to the Modulor by Le Corbusier, and by extension, to all the production of artificial objects. In the small white room, Simo becomes the model, in the double meaning of archetype and main role. Surrounded by objects, she demonstrates that the ideal prototype actually corresponds to a stereotype. Simo acts without pause, compulsively, carrying fetishes, in a world crowded with bags containing boxes, and boxes containing shoes .”