Aveta doesn’t film, he composes videos. He composes them frame by frame, submitting them to the alchemy of his magic emulsion, his disappearing tonic. He edits something that was nev- er filmed. He sets the photographs in motion so that they appear to be moving images. Nevertheless, the movement is fictitious, de- formed and clumsy. There is nothing graceful about the movement of the bodies that have begun to appear in the photographs. They are bodies that have survived, horrified, the complete opposite of any advertising aesthetic.

They are simulated videos, then, that show the bodies that final- ly enter into Aveta’s empty spaces. They look like zombies: escaping from machine-gun fire from the air, groups colliding like a human tide crashing against itself in a knife-fight duel told in images as if it were a dance.

If bodies appear in Aveta’s work, it is so that they wind up disap- pearing.

An image stays on the retina: there are shadows of bodies there in thick outlines as if taken with a rudimentary camera and fixed onto canvas. The fabric’s texture can be perceived, its rough grain, the splinters of graphite and the imperfections. More than a readymade, the catastrophe is represented manually: handmade. Goya, the first of the contemporary artists, might have taken this photograph, if only the cameras and the darkroom mysteries and the paint that make things disappear had existed two hundred years ago.

Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War), the name given to the tremendous series of etchings in which Goya docu- mented his time, might well be yet another name for Aveta’s remov- able spaces.