For ‘Tema Celeste’ magazine
“Sublime soul of my being, my future with you is a pleasure,” croon the musicians of El Binomio de Oro. These sugary Spanish-language lyrics greeted visitors entering The Precious Stone and Gold Factory, an installation originally commissioned by Rice University Art Gallery in Texas. Arena’s trademark use of vallenato, the folk music of her native Columbia, set the mood for an adventurous show full of wistful meditations on romance and storytelling.
The music was accompanied by a small wall-mounted monitor that displayed not images of the band but the lyrics of the song “Full of You,” translated into English. On another monitor, flashes of lightning periodically shattered a perfect night sky full of twinkling stars. The presence of these stars during a storm was as mysterious as the unexplained dazzling light that appeared in a short video projected against a gallery wall. Shot at sunrise on a beach, the clip featured a beam of light on the horizon that was brighter than the rising sun. Both scenes served to introduce the short story that was at the heart of the exhibition: Using Dramatica, a software program used by writers to generate story outlines, Arenas concocted a narrative about a man who, suffering from unrequited love, exiles himself to the countryside, where he invents a machine to manufacture gems from the beauty of nature. On the back walls, three small monitors and three digital prints tracked the transformation of flowers, berries, and buds, sucked into a spinning vortex and released as sapphires, diamonds, and rubies.
The relationship between El Binomio’s lyrics and a story in which the countryside gives up precious stones for a clever inventor is hard to pin down but evocative. Perhaps the Golden Duo (a rough translation of the band’s name) was mining the language of the Latin love song to come up with its lyrical gems. In light of the fact that the lover serenaded in vallenato is considered by some to represent the homeland, Arenas seems to be making love to her native country while realizing that her recollections of its beauty are seen through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia.
