Germán Bobe: Early Works

This lyrical piece celebrates the male body simply and elegantly. Its subject, Christophe, is exquisitely portrayed by the sepia-toned balletic video. Three men dressed in overcoats dance in and out of the frame in front of a mostly stationary camera. Occasionally they open or partially remove the overcoats to display beautifully sculpted male bodies.

Ángel Reparador (The Healing Angel) was shot in Buenos Aires, where the artist Sergio De Loof films Bobe in different places along the route that goes from the house of his parents, in the south of the suburbs, to the city center. The piece thus reflected the practice of “yire”, common among the community gay and dissident in a city that, at that time, did not offer spaces anywhere possible to freely express homosexual love. The Healing Angel is a work that gives account of a sweet, affectionate love, one that always looks towards the other beloved with desiring and avid gaze on the city itself.

El jardín del amor (The garden of love) is a celebration of life and love, religious ecstasy, where animals, humans and nature coexist in harmony.

La Intolerancia en el Jardín de las Mentiras y el Pecado (The Intolerance in the Garden of Lies and Sin) recounts the rupture of the relationship between friends due to the ambition of the prized object. The baroque and the renaissance are stylistic references that Bobe uses in his compositions and this will be no exception. Mythology, Botticelli, a black ephebe, and The Three Graces are the ingredients that make up this work.

A psychedelic baroque interpretation of religion under a visual hyperbole. The Christ, the Passion, and the Trinity are some symbols present.

The Dream of the Darkest Hour takes the intrigue and mystery of Bobe's other works but exacerbates it in such a way that it is overpowered by aesthetics and experimental tonality. Within how limited its elements are, each one of them plays a fundamental role since without one, the others tend to remain in the air.

This dreamlike, poetic video provokes the viewer to question the nature of the most human of experiences. The collage aesthetic exposes how human relationships—between men and women, men and men, women and women—are mediated by dominant ideologies as represented in the mass media and religion. Bobe posits no theories and draws no conclusions, leaving the viewer with a truly postmodern conundrum about life, love, art, men, women and death.

This title is also available on Betraying Amnesia: Latin America Video Portraiture.

Combining collage and animation with an Asian-influenced soundtrack, images of women dancing sensually and devotional imagery, Matsushima Ondo compares religious devotion with sexual representation. The viewer is invited to make connections and recognize the irony in some of the similarities.

A caricature of a professor teaching English to non-native speakers. Her mannerisms, her accent, the content of her speech—all are absurd, in the tradition of an Ionesco character. Images of the professor alternate with collages, many taken from Bobe’s other works. Through its ironic humor, La Profesora foregrounds the absurdity of teaching English in a country where many cannot read their native language. The prevalence of the English language in post- and neo-colonial societies is thus called into question, both politically and socially.

This short piece introduces the visual artist German Bobe. A narrator explains Bobe’s background in various media, stressing that his work—the media he chooses and the themes he revisits—presents a synthesis of the concerns of his generation.

In Spanish.