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Bon Dieu Bon: a journey through suspension
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Chernobyl
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Chernobyl
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Chernobyl
Curatorship Opening: Dense local (third disagreement)
Intervention in public space // RECURRENCIES
Interactive installation // AEurásia
Claudio Santos, André Amparo, Alessandra Soares, Fernando Maculan
The interactive video installation project AEurásia presents a trip around the World, all within the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. A map of AEurásia was created based on geographical connections created inside the city’s urban area. AEurásia is a made-up continent that puts all the world together inside a single city. The main purpose of this project is to present the city in a new way. AEurásia creates an immersive feeling in which, being in Belo Horizonte, one can experience sensations of being in many different locations around in the world. The project aims to stimulate people knowing better their own cities. The video installation space has 8 translucid white screens and 8 video projectors. Each screen presents a different video that connects points of the city of Belo Horizonte and co-related international chosen locations. At the end of the itinerary visitors interact with a large video projection where images of themselves, captured by a video camera and digitally processed, are inserted onto many different touristic locations. The images of visitors inserted over the locations are recorded and sent to their email addresses –a souvenir of the virtual touristic trip– and also to a fotolog specially designed for the project: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aeurasia
Instalation // CHERNOBYL PROJECT
The aim of the ongoing Chernobyl Project is to create a radiographic series of images of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, depicting the most affected regions within the area, at the Belarusian side of the border. These are images imprinted by the very invisible radiation that has contaminated this place for more than two decades since the Chernobyl disaster, specific images of an empty, abandoned place, yet filled by an intangible energy that contaminates the whole environment, and yet reamins totally invisible except for the destruction traces it leaves behind. The Chernobyl Project demanded the creation of specific autoradiography technology applied to the particular conditions required by the radioactive contamination in Chernobyl. This technology enables us to generate pictures with invisible radiation by way of direct-contact between radiographic film and contaminated matter in the zone, producing life-size images as outcome. The first stage of this technique was created in collaboration with scientists at the Radio-Protection Institute, in Rio de Janeiro. It has been then further developed at the Medical Faculty of the University of Munich, in cooperation with the Otto Hug Foundation, in Gomel, Belarus. As foresaw in our experiments in the labs in Rio and Munich, for each sheet of negative, the exposure time in the Chernobyl Zone is very long, at least two months. This creates a back-and-forth work-dynamics between Berlin (our base), Gomel (the second largest city in Belarus, a few hours to the exclusion zone) and Chernobyl.
Instalation // BON DIEU BON: a journey through suspension
Bon Dieu Bon (God is good), is a term largely used in Haiti, to express hope that despite the present circumstances, somehow, things will work out. BonDieuBon is an ongoing collaborative project with Lori Lee, an anthropologist. The original project focused on Haitian emigration to the Virgin Islands and it has progressed to include issues in the Haitian homeland and migration to the Dominican Republic. Immigrants land late at night in areas less exposed to artificial light. They swim to the shore, performing the last stroke of a journey that goes through a series of islands in the Caribbean. Behind some bushes, people are wet, fearful, and disoriented. In that state they will leave, forget, surrender, dispose or lose objects, clothes, letters, products or photos. These objects are the source of an archive that we have created. For this series, the vantage point to observe Haitian migration was initiated with studio photograph portraits found near the shore or the woods of the US Virgin Islands, specifically on the small island of St. John, where they were thrown aside by the owners while they ran from migration police. These photographs become physical witnesses as they are transmogrified (distorted and transformed), by the effects of water and they become symbolic witnesses of their identity or others’ identity in transformation. In that context we understand the photo studio performance as the initial journey, as the denial of chaotic reality and the active self-construction of their own imaginary and utopic ideal. The act of the portrait ultimately becomes simultaneously an act of memory, leaving the resulting images for others to remember him or her and imagine his/her future, through this desire of a journey to the landscape painted as background. Ultimately the photographs are an act of resistance, where people take control over their own construction of identity. These images are an index of the journey: the photos are subjected to the migration process, the transformation of the elements—salt water, exposure to the sun and rain—as a metaphor of the transformation of identity, and the psychological effects of the journey.
Artists:
Ashok Sukumaran, Claudio Santos, Alessandra Soares, Fernando Maculan, André Amparo, Pedro Veneroso, Alice Miceliand Edgar Endress
Curatorship:
Gunalan Nadarajanand Eduardo de Jesus
- Oct 3, 2009
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- 20:30
- Place: Laboratorio Arte Alameda
