A gesture is a way of nonverbal communication performed with some part of the body and caused by the movement of our joints and muscles. Sign language allows to express a great variety of sensations and thoughts, from comptent and hostility to approval and affection. Some gestures can (or can’t) be considered culturally acceptable depending on the context in which they take place, for the gesture has an evident cultural dimension, but others are repeated in almost everyone regardless of the context.
During the recording of a video on substandard housing in Lavapiés, I confirmed that people interviewed pinned their hopes on their problems’ resolution. Their position towards the camera was similar to the one in front of a wishing well. The outcome of this was a series of videos recorded in Spain, Taiwan and Brazil on which portraits of people of different races, ages and social status are showed. All of them lasted an average of twenty seconds during which participants were asked to make a wish in their minds but not to express it. “Video of wish” does not pretend to be a psychological or social experiment but an artistic action which shows the gestures generated by the action of wishing as something innate, involuntary and common to all human beings.
The work proposed is a device based on the mentioned video recordings which will be showed randomly together with others performed during the development-exhibition of the project. All the videos must be projected in the same screen so the person-object of the current recording can see himself/herself as a part of that group of human beings, united by the ability to wish.
