González Angulo Pedro: Absque Nomen

Identity is a set of intrinsic characteristics that define an individual or a community in front of the others. When identity becomes a document, it is because the State has decided to mediate in order to identify ourselves as citizens through the registration of the name given by our parents and turn it into an official document, without which a series of routine operations become impossible: the birth certificate. Our names, and a brief genealogy of the generations that precede us are poured on it to “support” that our condition of existence is made possible by a piece of paper that serves as a proof. What happens when this document is deliberately destroyed?
Is it an effacement action of our being-in-the-world representation in front of the State? Or a much simpler gesture that seeks to question the nominative action implicit in the name and the edges between subject and object? ¿Do we objectify others when we name them?
All of these questions arise while experiencing the work of Pedro Gonzalez Angulo: a single-channel real-time video in which the artist carefully dissects his birth certificate until reduced to its minimal expression, which is accompanied by a series of metal plates of his Birth Certificate that have been intervened in various ways. One appears with all consonants intentionally hidden, another one some ink has been left visible, and the last plate has been exposed to weather to be naturally devastated by the action of air and water.
Thus, through these very simple and concrete gestures, the artist underpins the concerns that permeate the rest of his work: Where does the notion of identity lie? How to dissolve and blur the idea of authorship?