Pegasus Dance

With Pegasus Dance, made in the Netherlands in 2007 in collaboration with the Rotterdam riot police, Fernando Sánchez Castillo revises the functions that are generally associated with power, in this case, the anti-riot water cannon vehicles. The vehicles play out a dance set to a Strauss waltz. Through their series of circular motions, the two vehicles act out a sort of melodrama, replete with a sense of romance, longing, and triumph. By doing so the artist reinvents the violent nature of these instruments and slows down their tempo, accommodating them in an unusual poetic climate. Rather than instruments of oppression, they operate in favor of art and culture. The plays of light are filtered through the water that they shoot to the sound of music; the colors are degraded, the afternoon becomes pleasant and the scene intoxicating, almost like a bucolic landscape painting.