EVENT: MIGUEL ESCOBAR (JANUARY 16-29 2026)
El Pájaro Intestino
single-channel digital video essay, color, sound, 9’ 40”, 2024, Colombia
created by Miguel Escobar
introduced by Matteo Bittanti
El Pájaro Intestino (Intestinal Bird) is presented on VRAL as a single-channel work from Arreglo Selvático (Jungle Arrangement), a series that repurposes digital resources from the Colombian wildlife documentary Colombia Magia Salvaje (2015) to dissect a campaign level from Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013). Escobar treats the videogame jungle as an assemblage of tropical signs – foliage, fruit, animal life – built for legibility and spectacle, then reinterprets it through still-life motifs such as food, exoticism, and the uncanny liveliness of inert objects. In the video, a cloned documentary voice describes an endemic bird and its diet while the camera traverses The Hunted, a level fictionally located somewhere between Central and South America. The narration retains the calm authority of educational television, yet the space cannot corroborate its claims: plants and fruits accumulate like a banquet, but relations remain blocked, and the only volumetric animal is surrounded by nourishment it cannot touch. Moving between ecosystem and extracted asset set, the work shows how nature can be packaged as a portable image category – iterable, consumable, and ultimately disposable – within militarised entertainment.
Miguel Escobar is a Colombian artist working with video, digital imaging, and installation. His practice begins from the lived condition of post-digital spectatorship and seeks ways to interrupt the smoothness of consumption through operations of dissection, spatialisation, and guided tours through mediated environments. Across videogames, films, and instructional media, he tracks how militarisation can be camouflaged by pastoral aesthetics, and how bucolic imagery can function inside violent products without losing its appeal. Escobar’s recent work draws on asset extraction, 3D modelling, generative graphics, and photogrammetry to treat commercial media as material, something that can be opened, rebuilt, and made to misbehave. He graduated with a BFA in Fine Arts from the Instituto Departamental de Bellas Artes (Cali, 2017), receiving a Meritorious Mention for his graduation project, and completed an MFA (2020) and a Master’s degree in Photography (2021) at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels; both master’s theses were awarded magna cum laude. His work has been presented at events including Byte Footage (Buenos Aires, 2018), Festival Hungry Eyes (Giessen, 2020), Loops.Expanded at the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado (Lisbon, 2020), and Simultan Festival XIX (Timișoara, 2024), and in group exhibitions such as Una Selva Pixelada (Lugar a Dudas, Cali, 2024) and Espesuras: Habitar un mundo herido (Museo La Tertulia, Cali; Parque Explora, Medellín, 2024–2025). His honours include a Meritorious Mention at the Salón de Arte Joven de Cali (2014) and the INPUT/OUTPUT Prize (Bruges, 2021).