That Young Girl is in Love

The video installation That Young Girl is in Love by Alejandra Morote Peralta deals intensively with the construction and communication of romantic love. To this end, it collages fragments from various media, from family archives to popular culture from the late 1980s and early 1990s, in an intimate way. Much of this material originates in Lima, the artist's hometown. In the course of the video, song lyrics appear again and again. They trace how ideals of love are expressed, consumed and internalized.

Visitors are invited to sit on a red garden chair with a view of the screen. The familiar, homely chair is reminiscent of the garden as a setting for family life and thus immerses the audience in the spatial structures of intimacy. There is a bowl of red gelatin on a pulsating loudspeaker, which vibrates in time with a line from the video: “... the desire makes you feel like jelly. It's not wine, Rita, it's blood.” This line is from Alan Rudolph's movie Choose Me (1984), which Peralta's grandparents videotaped on television, on exactly the same video tape that contains the family footage. In these various media fragments of the installation, love appears as something contagious. It makes it possible to reshape the self.