When a group of artists get together to play the Surrealist game 'Exquisite Corpse' on Valentine's Day, what emerges is 'Love Letter', a composite document of a certainly exquisite and generic expression of passion. The 'cadavre exquis' emerged in the 1920s as a Surrealist appropriation of an old parlour game in which players took turns writing a phrase on a piece of paper such that they could not see what was written by the previous player, thus creating sometimes absurd or even profound results. The poetry and later drawings depicted what Nicolas Calas described as the "unconscious reality in the personality of the group". In 1974, Marroquin creates a video document of a collective valentine written by himself and five friends, whereby the final text is read…while we see the image of someone writing the letter. The documentation is deceiving in this sense, for beyond the introduction of the artists in the beginning, what we see and hear is a single person authoring this love letter. In this simple twist, Marroquin uses the medium to recreate the concept of Exquisite Corpse with an added deception, as a result making an interesting observation on the misleading contrivances of the game of love. (Elaine W. Ho) Read more...