In Sus­pen­si­on a young man is han­ging in the air, fal­ling, or per­haps drif­ting through time and spa­ce. The­re is no par­ti­cu­la­ror defi­ni­te way to under­stand his situ­a­ti­on. The enlar­ged ima­ge of the fal­ling man gains a monu­men­tal qua­li­ty in the exhi­bi­ti­on spa­ce, whe­re spec­ta­tors are able to move up and down stairs and pla­teaus to enga­ge with the ima­ge in a more inti­ma­te way. The instal­la­ti­on takes its depar­ting point from Moebius’s comic strip Abso­lu­ten Cau­fel­trail, whe­re a man falls end­les­sly, cros­sing in his plun­ge seve­r­al gates or dimen­si­ons of paral­lel uni­ver­ses. In his re-ima­gi­na­ti­on of a man’s fall, Sebas­tián Díaz Mora­les envi­si­ons the world as an end­less void, evo­king a time­less gra­vi­ty that makes us fall dee­per and dee­per into our own humanity.

Diaz Morales’s ques­ti­o­ning of rea­li­ty in film, whe­ther con­cerning lands­ca­pe, the urban, or even the soci­o­po­li­ti­cal, has been mar­ked from the very out­set by a fun­da­men­tal dis­trust of the belief in a sin­gle, uni­fied rea­li­ty. With Diaz Mora­les, the came­ra does not func­ti­on as a medi­um for faith­ful­ly depic­ting and recor­ding what is obser­ved, but is an essen­ti­al, even epis­te­mic means for ques­ti­o­ning and approp­ri­a­ting reality.

Diaz Morales’s exa­mi­na­ti­on of per­cep­ti­on and rea­li­ty is based on the assump­ti­on that rea­li­ty itself is by natu­re high­ly fic­ti­o­nal. ​“I am very inte­rested in the noti­on of rea­li­ty and fic­ti­on. (…) My work explo­res the boun­da­ries bet­ween rea­li­ty and fic­ti­on,” says Diaz Mora­les. Thus, his films do not sim­ply trans­port the vie­wer into ano­ther, sur­re­al, or phan­ta­s­mal realm, but they strip rea­li­ty of its fami­li­a­ri­ty and dis­tort it, making it seem like some­thing else.

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