From 20th May to 7th July the Joan Miro Foundation will be presenting
Catastrophe, an installation by the Canadian artist David Hoffos that will bring the
Singular Electrics cycle to a close. The curators of the cycle have been Teresa
Badia, Jorge Luis Marzo and Rosa Sanchez.

David Hoffos was born in Montreal in 1966 and lives and works in Lethbridge, Canada. The installation at the Foundation has recently been exhibited at the Alberta College of Art & Design, Canada.

In Catastrophe, Hoffos invites us to reflect on technology in the context of its relationship with illusionism and its potential as a medium for creating an illusion of reality. Profoundly interested in image technology prior to the arrival of the motion picture, Hoffos conceives the installation as a cinema-theatre in miniature, where the reality seen above a model is filmed and projected in real time onto a cinerama screen - or telerama screen, as he prefers to call it.

So, when the visitor enters the Espai 13, a number of sensors set off a projection around him of scenes of make-believe catastrophes - earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes in eruption, air crashes, shipwrecks, fires, etc. As he approaches the model, he finds himself immersed in these disasters and, because he is being filmed, becomes both the subject and the viewer.

David Hoffos makes no attempt to deceive us with false realities, but merely to demonstrate that with this illusionist component, almost like a conjuring trick, he is able to bring the spectator on to the stage, and by immersing him in the spectacle both the perspective and the critical sense of things is lost.