Fred Schmidt-Arenales‘ practice highlights the mutually reinforcing relationship between individual behaviors and collective power structures, and tests points of departure from these habitual reinforcements. The sites of his investigations include governmental structures, imperial and colonial legacies, public and private institutions (like universities), and political conflicts over control and access to natural resources. Drawing from a breadth of source material, his practice stages scenes and conversations, sometimes participatory, which enact specific histories, objects, and people in order to bring awareness to implicit power dynamics and authority structures. He then documents these interactions and transcribes, translates, and edits them into films, installations, and performances. Through this process of mediation, the work reports on one or multiple experiences of the production process, creating spatial installations and time based works in which audiences can make their own discoveries and form their own hypotheses, and ideally reflect on how the kind of dynamics depicted in the work unfold in the communities, groups, and relationships that they take part in.
Image: Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Committee of Six, 2022. Single-channel video installation. Image courtesy of the artist.