• Single-channel video
• Video installation

The Truth is an Excuse talks about art, about its language of transmission and about the different interlocutors involved in discourse. It also speaks (possibly in the same way) about matters of concern to us that are separate from art itself, such as our identification with a specific, individual identity, or memory and its links with the reality, of the cadences of failure. … and of the rhythm and relentlessness of shipwrecks.

For Ampudia there is no incontrovertible truth, and everything – our belief systems as well as near or distant memories, even our perceptions and comments – is a response to a conceptual hoax: there is no truth, only a point of view, a location from which to observe reality. It is because of this that truth can change with no more than a simple change in the slides of reality.

Through the simple mechanism of reversing the direction of the film projection the video The Truth is an Excuse, “repatriates” the Spanish exiles of the Civil War to their side of the border, returns them home before our very eyes, and brings into the open the greater and bloodier cruelty of their historical destiny and its parallel brotherhood with contemporary exiles. Injured men walk backwards, children drink their own tears, French guards recover a crashed or overturned car and Le Perthus pass brings back Spaniards who never ceased to be such.

On the floor are mechanical instruments, robots which are halfway between a gun and an infant’s car ‘mash’ (in the words of the artist), excerpts from Hölderlin’s Hyperion – that boy devastated by war and human nature: ‘The heart’s surging wave would not foam up so beautifully and become spirit, did not the ancient cliff of Fate stand silently opposing it.’ (From “Hyperion and Selected Poems: Friedrich Hölderlin, edited by Eric Santner, translated by William L. Trask)