Only weeks following the fall of Baghdad to U.S.-led forces in spring 2003, photos showing the collective face of the brash but uncertain occupation began to circulate throughout the world. One of the best-known of these early images shows enlisted men using the grandly decorated swimming pool in one of Saddam Huseein’s sons’ palaces as a skateboard track. Considered in light of the insurrection that would begin in earnest a few months later, the layering within the image becomes fundamental to its posterior meaning: in the background lies yesterday’s opulent decadence, transformed into a completely different kind of playground by a harsh and ignorant intruder.

For the members of El Perro, the skateboarding image is nothing less than iconic, for it also symbolizes everything that is misguided and imperialistic about the entire Iraq campaign – indeed, about the U.S.’s increasingly unilateral actions in a world where such actions are seen as dangerous and destabilizing, but where no other state has the ability to directly challenge its hegemony. The result is a kind of parable, in reverse, of what has gone wrong.

Democracia, the video work that El Perro produced in response to this image, makes its first impression by way of the title’s rendering in a typeface that is identical to that of the heavy-metal group Metallica. Although Democacia’s soundtrack is more deeply rooted to synthesizers and the dance-floor than to metal, the breakneck pace of the camera work and editing has an intensity that would not be out of place in a Metallica video.

The scene: an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of a large city. Its walls are covered in graffiti, and it practically glowers with the futility of planned obsolescence. Enter a group of youthful skateboarding marauders, who rapidly transform the industrial shell into an arena of vaulting jumps and spins, hairpin turns and screeching stops. They have only one focus, which is to completely subvert the building’s function to their own uses. And if anyone happens to doubt what, if any, their long-term goals might be, this doubt is quickly put to rest in the final scene, in which each of the skateboards, emblazoned with the title logo, is systematically shattered into splinters.