The Swap

The conditions for the existence of the human being, since its genesis, come up against the limited time available for living. Death is, in the first glance, the ultimate fear and destiny of every living being. It will not be surprising that we all spend a large part of our lives creating mechanisms that allow us to survive or even to leave a legacy that challenges the eternal rest. What if it was possible to avoid Death? How would a species be motivated whose biological purpose (like all other species) is to breed and have offsprings? Furthermore, how would the human race be organized in a future where the great engine of human action and survival had disappeared?
Much of the work developed during my artistic practice is about Death and its web of influences in Contemporary Society. All this restlessness created by the inevitability leads me to an obsessive and unrestrained search to unravel the intricacies where Death walks, the trail it leaves and forces me to face the difficulty in accepting ephemerality. During a common search for literary works on the subject, I came across a rather obscure tale by the writer Kurt Vonnegut, called “2 B R 0 2 B”. Without great expectations, I started reading and analyzing it. The result could not have been more positive. An “Eureka” moment: what if death and illness did not exist? What if, in a future with the countless possibilities that now present itself, we could simply live forever without the worry of a black spectrum wielding scythe haunting us?
It's in this context that the idea behind the short-film "The Swap” arises. Entertaining an apparently absurd idea, new questions arose and fed the concept: how would the species be renewed? What does a future look like where one of the biggest biological motivators has been eradicated? How would a society be organized without fear of a common fate? And, suddenly, it became easy to understand the influence that Death has on the structure of Humanity, the never-ceasing search for its suppression while assuming itself as one of the most important psychological drivers for the prosperity of a species that shapes the World to its own will.
Created in an Academic context, the challenges that arose for the realization of a film, in its genesis, were fantastical. The definition of a retro approach and with strong authoritarian influences appears as a mirror of a contemporaneity where nostalgia is assumed as a defining characteristic, even for the wrong reasons.
Using a myriad of references from the various fields of artistic practice, from literature, with names at the head like José Saramago and Franz Kafka, through design, with Russian Constructivism as a strong influence, and ending in Cinema, with works like “1984” , “Children of Men” and “Blade Runner”, the project was gaining shape and strength for its conception.
As in most of the works that I have been developing, the film assumes itself as a reflection on Death, but this time, through its “antagonist”: Life. Questioning the value of Life, the "price" of it and the barbarities to which the Human Being is able to subject himself to trick Death, "The Swap" intends to raise some questions and create discussion in a Society dedicated to hide the greatest certainty that a Human Being can have.