23.08.03 'Osh' live art action (Selknam II) Umspannwerk, Kreuzberg, Berlin (as part of Changing Channels London Biennale Pollinations) (digital video by Gines Olivares) collaborators

Osh (18') is also the title of a film by mmmmm (in collaboration with Gines Olivares and Felipe Luck).

Reviews in spanish by Isabel Rodríguez and Cristóbal Bianchi

'OSH' is a fertility ritual made by mmmmm in a former Power Station (Berlin, Germany August 2003). It was inspired from the now extinct Selkínamí (indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego southern Chile). The original ritual Oshkonhaninhí, was a phallic ritual in which the women of the group made tails from bull rushes for the men to use as substitute penises. The men formed a circle and slowly rotated chanting xas, the sound and speed of rotation reached a crescendo until finally the mens heads lowered and their tales rose up creating a visual group erection.

In our re-working of this ritual we cycled naked around the streets of the Power Station neighborhood (Kreuzberg) chanting xas. We then used a 5000 Kg crane to pass a cigarette, a toothbrush and a chili pepper between us. The negotiation and use of these objects together with artifacts from the original Selkínam ritual are fused to create a mutated hybrid contemporary ritual.

The everyday objects in the ritual are transformed into icons of our contemporary ritual, the mass produced becomes unique through this process and changes our relation towards mass consumption. It is an attempt to put the aura (1) back into the artwork.

In the film OSH (18mins DVD) a red chili pepper swings gently against the female artists vagina to the text of the last surviving Selkínam Shaman, Lola Kiepja.
The chilli is Chile as defined by the shape of the geographical borders of the country. It is also red in relation to the most valued commodity of desire for the Selkínam people (land would be traded to the colonialists in exchange for red objects and materials).

In a psychoanalytic sense it serves as the maternal phallus (2) in the eye of the onlooker, it reminds the fetishist of his own castration in the way that the colonialists destroyed the Selkínam people in their own pathological commodity fetishism of land and property.

The process of re-evaluating the mass-produced, of embedding it with different times and contexts through actions and relations to the body forms the basis of our investigations into excess and consumption. It is in this process of transforming the mass-produced into a unique totemic object that the presence of the body becomes apparent.