Javier Velázquez Cabrero: The Silver Lake [301.81(F60:81)]

Casa Maauad presents the Project Room of Javier Velázquez Cabrero. Influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s ideas of detachment and epic theater, Velázquez explores the construction and projection of public identity, examining its flow between reason and emotion through the acting method of psychological realism.

The Silver Lake [301.81 (F60:81)] is a journey through the public and private mind of L. Ron Hubbard (creator of the religious cult Scientology) through the personalities of two characters from his Science Fiction books. It is a 3 channel video installation that explores Velázquez’s earlier work, Metánesis, through audiovisual tools to emphasize the contradictions and paradoxes of Hubbard’s leadership and the power structures that emerged.

Velázquez also explores the border separating the actor from his character. The dialogues are not based on a predetermined script, but are improvised with the purpose of bringing the methodology of the actor, Pedro Mira, to its limit. This process required Mira to know his character in depth so that he could react as Hubbard would by imitating his speech, intention, energy, body posture, character, and ideology during interviews with the psychoanalyst John P. Brand. 
Hubbard wrote Mission Earth shortly before his death, it is a science fiction novel not only interesting because of the content or narrative, but for Hubbard’s own complex personality evident throughout. The protagonists are two alter egos, the hero who possesses all of the attributes Hubbard assigned to himself and the antihero who has Hubbard’s less socially acceptable traits, as described by critics and those who knew him closely.

The second half of the tittle, [301.81 (F60:81)], stems from Narcissistic Personality Disorder from the psychiatric manual DSM-5. It was the diagnosis given to the actor playing Hubbard by his psychoanalyst after multiple sessions and is considered to be the most commonly diagnosed pathology in society today.

Javier Velázquez Cabrero (Madrid, 1990), has a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Complutense University of Madrid, and studied in Germany at the ABK Stuttgart with Professor Christian Jankowski, he is currently pursuing a graduate degree from SOMA in Mexico City. Recent shows including Mostra Espanha at the Bienal de Coimbra
(Portugal); New Proposals Zona Maco 2016; Video Festival Cairo (Egypt), and Slowtrack Gallery (Madrid).