In Chapter II, titled Bitter Logic, a series of elements are constant in this selection of 3 videos produced between 2020 and 2023: a desolate city, sculptures made for the camera, animations, a certain textural and sound microtonality, but above all a psychic landscape, difficult to describe but one that is somehow familiar. The videos are articulated through a series of repetitions that simultaneously empty the images and gestures of meaning, and fill them with new implications or possible relationships. An oscillation between past and present, indolence and urgency, and between the mundane and the sinister.


Claudio Iglesias points out that a ghostly presence circulates through the videos, as if the trauma of an inherited culture, of an imposed logic, decanted into a perverse use of cinematographic language. Segal subverts the conventions and grammar of cinema in a subtle but constant way. The animations, in the lineage of drawing, restore and expose the fragmentary nature of the montage: star fruit only looks like a star when sliced, we often name things by the shape they take on being destroyed, and in this sense Segal prefers starting from its splinters, from its fragments to unite them, without claiming an invisible scar, but rather a scar that is so visible that it becomes a drawing.

In Incomplete Disappearance (2021), Alan Martín Segal explores the arbitrary forms, systems and protocols in Buenos Aires, meditating on its physical and social infrastructures. The video presents a stream of consciousness of a fragmented subjectivity, based on a series of texts that show a microscopic analysis of social norms and customs in Buenos Aires. Segal combines everyday shots of the city with repetitive recreations of banal gestures that become perverse, revealing, layer by layer, the disturbing presence of fantasies and colonial ideologies embedded in urban routine.

Sin Anterioridad (2022) highlights both the contrasts and the similarities between distant practices, geographically and temporally. The sensuality of the animations, superimposed with dreamlike images of fabrics, skins and spaces devoid of figures, are underlined by texts that push us to think that what they refer to without prior is the nature of mnemonic operations, where so much their iconography as the matter exposed. Finally, implying that without the past there is no regret.

"Before it was like this, now it is like this" is one of the recurring phrases in Club Macara (2023). The question is what was one way, and now is another? But in that game of words appears a feature present in all works: minor and convincing forms of magic; the trick. Club Macara is populated by many visual games that are presented as one more instance of assembly /editing that, in its insistence on revealing the artificiality of the images (mostly cardboard models of deliberately precarious realism), does nothing more than expose a game/dynamic, a power that determines what is shared and what is kept quiet.