Deconstructing Peter Pan
is a declaration of intent that demystifies the childhood and the path to becoming an adult,
full of adversities that we will never leave. The magic goes running out, dissipates and we
must recognize that flying is in our imagination but it is not real.
I don't want to talk about that sweet world you live when you are growing up. My work
wants to talk just the other way around, about what surrounds you but still feels fremd
to you. I do not speak of anything new, but rather I try to ask questions about the few
changes that as human beings we experience throughout our history.
Wars have changed, but the dead are the same. The human being has been facing loss
and pain in different ways over the centuries, but they remain the same. Loneliness, still
our best friend and our worst enemy. What happens when, being consistent with your
time, the magical world where you came from just disappears?
Myths are good, but also they are a double edged sword for human vulnerability.
Demystifying Peter Pan is an excuse to ask for why we are so little evolutionary, why we
are enemies of different thoughts and ways of life, why we keep on destroying in favour
and against us.
My work wants to be a mirror, not leave anyone indifferent, it wants to be what the
spectator himself sees. My work would not exist without that premise. I question the pure
childhood, curiosity, obsession with things, fatality, indifference, old age, death as final.
Deconstructing Peter Pan is conceived as a journey through images I find, mix and
decontextualize, creating a mental and emotional confusion: chaos and disorder is the
engine that seems to be everyone's travelling companion, and my tool is precisely that. My
medium is the Internet, where I act as if I was a bank robber but stealing images instead of
money. It is similar and this is why I define myself as a visual offender.
In my work, I very often use of images of the Butto dance, created after the first nuclear
bombing in the history of mankind on civilian targets in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945,
and which resulted in the unconditional surrender of Japan to the Allied forces. The
images of that Holocaust, with survivors walking disoriented, with their bodies burned and
the eyeballs popped and hanging over their cheeks, caused horror and revulsion among
the Japanese. This way, the Butto was born, the "dance into the darkness".
This dance is for me a form of knowledge. In primitive societies suffering was a
knowledge, and they used it to question themselves. As a result, there was an evolution. In
our contemporary society, we reject the suffering and consequently we get lost like a blind
man who doesn't find the key to get out of the room in which he is trapped.
Deconstructing Peter Pan? The madness begins in our own skeleton, and becomes
material with ignorance and lust for destruction.
Xan Medina
Berlín, September 2013
is a declaration of intent that demystifies the childhood and the path to becoming an adult,
full of adversities that we will never leave. The magic goes running out, dissipates and we
must recognize that flying is in our imagination but it is not real.
I don't want to talk about that sweet world you live when you are growing up. My work
wants to talk just the other way around, about what surrounds you but still feels fremd
to you. I do not speak of anything new, but rather I try to ask questions about the few
changes that as human beings we experience throughout our history.
Wars have changed, but the dead are the same. The human being has been facing loss
and pain in different ways over the centuries, but they remain the same. Loneliness, still
our best friend and our worst enemy. What happens when, being consistent with your
time, the magical world where you came from just disappears?
Myths are good, but also they are a double edged sword for human vulnerability.
Demystifying Peter Pan is an excuse to ask for why we are so little evolutionary, why we
are enemies of different thoughts and ways of life, why we keep on destroying in favour
and against us.
My work wants to be a mirror, not leave anyone indifferent, it wants to be what the
spectator himself sees. My work would not exist without that premise. I question the pure
childhood, curiosity, obsession with things, fatality, indifference, old age, death as final.
Deconstructing Peter Pan is conceived as a journey through images I find, mix and
decontextualize, creating a mental and emotional confusion: chaos and disorder is the
engine that seems to be everyone's travelling companion, and my tool is precisely that. My
medium is the Internet, where I act as if I was a bank robber but stealing images instead of
money. It is similar and this is why I define myself as a visual offender.
In my work, I very often use of images of the Butto dance, created after the first nuclear
bombing in the history of mankind on civilian targets in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945,
and which resulted in the unconditional surrender of Japan to the Allied forces. The
images of that Holocaust, with survivors walking disoriented, with their bodies burned and
the eyeballs popped and hanging over their cheeks, caused horror and revulsion among
the Japanese. This way, the Butto was born, the "dance into the darkness".
This dance is for me a form of knowledge. In primitive societies suffering was a
knowledge, and they used it to question themselves. As a result, there was an evolution. In
our contemporary society, we reject the suffering and consequently we get lost like a blind
man who doesn't find the key to get out of the room in which he is trapped.
Deconstructing Peter Pan? The madness begins in our own skeleton, and becomes
material with ignorance and lust for destruction.
Xan Medina
Berlín, September 2013
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