++++ The singer has only a piece of corrugated cardboard under his arm which he has perhaps ripped out of a supermarket carton. His hand slides so quickly and in so many, ever recurring patterns over the corrugated board that even the camera cannot properly follow the movements — a blurred shaking of the hand which generates an astonishing musical background. The rest is done by the voice. It seems to be something by the Gypsy Kings, but the singer's sadness sounds completely different, and the roughness of his singing is not a pose. He is wearing cheap polyester jogging trousers and his facial expression reveals drug intake.
Similar to the film by Esra Ersen (artist portrait 44) about the street children of Istanbul, the contribution to Manifesta by Alonso Gil is concerned with the outsiders in cities. His protagonists are beggars and confidence tricksters who have devoted themselves to an involuntary service, singing at restaurant tables and on street corners.
Some of them turn their misery into a weapon. A woman with a sunken face forces a song on her listeners which tells of her three children whom she tries to support by means of her modest abilities with singing and rhythm, because singing, she sings, is better than stealing. "Why don't you want to sleep with me?" she asks suddenly for, with some luck, that will probably earn more than singing and stealing together.
Alonso Gil was born in 1966 in Spain and lives in Seville where he made his film, a film in which the position of the viewer is almost the same as if you were on location in a street cafe. The same sequence of pity, recognition of musical qualities, feeling awkward, bad social conscience mixed with beggar romanticism and finally the feeling that this should be over as soon as possible passes through the viewer of An Error Occurred. Then comes usually the collection of coins through which you can buy your way out of the situation. "Not to feed them, not to hear them singing," Alonso Gil knows, "but to make them fall silent, since the sight of them is often unbearable".
Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Holbeinstraße 1, until 25 August. hoh