Urban landscapes series - Guatemala city. Objects collected, donated or exchanged in Guatemala City and masking tape. Variable dimensions. 2016.
20th Biennale of Contemporary Art Paiz / Ordinary / Extraordinary: The democratization of art or the will to change things.
The project, submitted within the framework of the 20th Biennale of Art Paiz of Guatemala City, consists of a series of works started in 2009 including La ciudad a dos tiempos Biennale of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Esteganografía / Paisaje enmascarado Sala CCU and Paisajes Urbanos / Mexico City only MACO project, and that will endeavor to achieve, through strategies of concealment and surfacing, a denial of the memory of objects, things, situations and/or landscapes, like a system aimed at silencing their memory and the emotional affiliation with our surroundings.
This operation presents itself as a method to avoid the “load” of the objects, as if we wished to deny them. It is in this utopian logic that the work tries to push figuration or extreme figuration to a zero-degree, and is constructed only in response to the notion of suspension and the habitability of three-dimensional form, which occurs through intervention and placement in connection with the relationship between work and place.
The process of surfacing using masking tape allows for a chromatic and material homogenizing of the objects, equalizing them, erecting a kind of suspension or levity of the scene.
The idea is to execute a piece that brings together a series of objects that almost incestuously construct a “sculptural event” loaded with readings related to the Latin American social context and urban landscape, playing with balances and imbalances, building parodies that give rise to reflections on the image of surfaced precariousness, which in the end divests the real image of its Latin American-ness and its spatial policies.
The work is made up of a vehicle and series of objects in disuse that are collected in homes and in the outskirts of the city; it is a piece that is executed in the act of collecting in a specific context and the coating of that urban image.
Photo Credit: Byron Mármol