Brooke Alfaro

Alfaro’s videos are to a great extent the product of intuition rather than experience with the medium, a situation reflected by the crude honesty of his works. For some videos, he writes the script, chooses the music, and then tells his actor-neighbors what to do. In others, the characters are doing their own thing and Alfaro works in the manner of a voyeur, taping their words and actions for scenes he later manipulates or reinterprets at his computer…

Born in Panama City, 1949. Alfaro graduated as an architect in 1976, and between 1980 and 1983 studied painting at The Arts Students League, New York. He lives and works in Panama…

To the singing of a classical but imperfect soprano voice and an indefinable rhythmic sound, a camera approaches a cathedral-looking ruin from above…

Brooke Alfaro is a quiet man, so I feared that interviewing him would be arduous, but I was wrong. The conversation flowed for hours, as he told me about his youth and nearly suppressed artistic aspirations, his struggles with overwhelming success as a painter and the new world he is discovering as a video artist.

The video shows a screen divided into sixteen blocks, illustrating the sequences of a hair cut. In essence it is about the monologues of five characters that are getting their hair cut. Within a play of juxtapositions fabricated by the audio, the spectator continually tries to find the block from where the voice is coming. The account of these individuals reveals the crude reality in which they live…