Un Mystique determinado (A Certain Mystique)

Through video, photography and music, Carles Congost explores youth identity and culture, combining the languages of music videos, film and television. Un mystique determinado is one of the early 2000s’ most emblematic Spanish pieces. The work is presented as a retro-style musical, with songs composed by the band Astrud, in which a young man abandons his sporting career and his girlfriend after feeling ‘touched’ by artistic inspiration (a kind of mystique, as he calls it), leading him to embrace his homosexuality and vocation as a video artist. The video’s climax comes with the satirical appearance of a bohemian Spanish artist from the 1960s–1970s, who bursts in with masculine arrogance to try to lecture him. Congost parodies and dismantles this inflated archetype of authority, experience and ego, reducing him to absurdity. This gesture reveals not only the decline of tradition as an unshakeable myth, but also the need to abandon an outdated hegemonic artist model to make way for new forms of subjectivity embedded in a broad social and creative fabric, embracing the idea of cultural work as a form of production