Installation
Anthem
Intsallation at BkSq Pittsburgh & Future Tenant Gallery
“Anthem” is an ongoing project that explores nationalism and geopolitics as a form of symbolic and contested territory. In this installation five reactive turntables that rotate according to the viewer’s motion through the installation produce a sonic landscape, shaped by overlapping layers of music and sounds originated by the continuos reproduction of national anthems found in vinyl records.
By playing official and unofficial versions of national anthems, this project defines a contentious space for the performance of nationalism and location-based identities: embodying the fragility, paradoxes and contradictions of the current geopolitical landscape.
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The collection of records includes the national anthems from Iran, Israel, Egypt, Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, the U.S anthem by Jimmy Hendix (from 1969), the former Soviet Union and even the galaxies.
Thanks to Galaxie Electronics in Pittsburgh P.A for all their generous support.
Norte Es Sur / South Is North
Notre es Sur is a participatory map (a reinterpretation of personal geographies) made in collaboration with participants from around the world. The entire project involves 10 videos recorded in different countries, as well as one sculpture and a video projection. The locations of the videos include: the US, Colombia, Brazil, Iceland, The Netherlands, Namibia, Russia, Yemen, W Australia and South Korea.
The exhibition took place in an empty commercial space in Pittsburgh PA, on March of 2011.
Fragments of the videos:
Norte / Sur— is the first piece of an on-going body of work. It is a collection of videos that show two places located within the same geographical longitude, but one in the Southern and the other in the Northern hemisphere. Both places are seen through a glass lens that alters the orientation of the horizon line in the final images.
This piece seeks to motivate a re-interpretation of conventional visions of planetary landscapes (distant abstractions from a birds-eye view point), by challenging the idea of verticality as a geopolitical paradigm. It also brings into question the traditional representation of world maps, while re-thinking the division or duality between ‘North’ and ‘South’, as unstable and inaccurate conceptual categories of ‘the global’.
Two videos were recorded in different locations and similar times, following the same instruction: put a magnifying lenses in front of the landscape in order to invert the image. The installation includes also a short video of a handwritten transcription of the 10th law of gravity by Newton, which says:
Two bodies attracting each other mutually, describe similar figures about their common center of gravity, and about each other mutually – Newton, Laws of gravity.
The entire text was written upside down, so the reader could experience a radical change of the orientation of the text, as well as the act of reading it.
Thanks to all my collaborators:
Sonia Pérez, Western Australia
Saskia Weltevrede, The Netherlands
Servaas Van Den Bosh & Tafadzwa Chirunda, Namibia
Lana Vogestad, Iceland
Arkady Tyurin, Saint-Petersburg - Russia
Sun Il Kim, South Korea
Thiago Galvão Hersan, São Paulo - Brazil
Paola Uribe, Yemen
Carlos Mario Camacho, Colombia
Free (Get A Life)
July 4th, 2012
Time Specific intervention. Skowhegan, Main. US
The sound was extracted from footage of sport events where the US anthem is interpreted by female pop singers. The voices include: Christina Aguilera, Whitney Houston, Mariah carey and Beyonce among others.
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Ephemeral Museum
The Ephemeral Museum of Venice, Bogotá.
http://museo.fundacionvisiva.org/
The museum was build on the roof of the Venice’s community cernter by VISIVA Foundation, Arq. César Rámirez / Arq. Christian Nieiman / Arq. Carlos Hernandez and students from Javeriana University.
The Project:
In 2009, as co-director of VISIVA, I worked on a collaborative project to build the Ephemeral Museum of Venice. The museum was constructed on the roof of an unfinished community center, using disposable materials donated by factories in the area. The collection of the museum is a series of reproductions of representative paintings from the history of art, produced by volunteer artists and art students, and its goal is to give the community access to cultural knowledge that is common for other social circles and also to generate the basis to better understand works of contemporary art.
Comunity center and Museum
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Context (The Biennial of Venice of Bogotá)
In a marginalized area of Bogota, there is a neighborhood called Venice. Since 2003, I’ve been part of a small collective that produces and curates a biennial urban art event modeled after the official one in Venice, Italy. It invites local and international artists to produce site-specific projects in the neighborhood, engaging the community and contextual problematics. This project has been the pioneer in Latin America in the field of relational aesthetics, and has motivated similar projects around the continent.
The Invisible Wall
The Invisible Wall, Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.
Tough Art Residency, Summer 2011
What if you could see, hear and feel beyond the walls of a museum?
The Invisible Wall is an art installation that exists in two museums, in two different countries, at the same time. The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh and Maloka children’s museum in Bogotá Colombia, are the home of this art project. It seeks to open a window of imagination across physical boundaries in the real world, creating connections between visitors in these two places. This art project stretches across 2,534 miles, as visitors engage in a playful exchange that collapses the distance between them.
The keyhole contains a camera and screen that facilitate the exchange, using real-time video streaming. This project was developed during an artist residency with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Summer 2011.
Installation view, Maloka Museum, Bogotá
Instants 301, 302, 303…
A fragment of the project Subject / Not / Subjected
Site specific video projection
By recording simultaneously four identical apartments on the same floor on the apartments building, the videos were overlapped and projected through the building’s window.
See stills below
She-He
Collective exhibition “Memory of the Body”
Fenalco Art Gallery, Bogotá. 2006
Installation and drawings on wall.
Graphite, paper and transparent resin on wall
By blowing the graphite toward the wall the drawings appear. This piece invites spectator’s intervention to blow the graphite and make visible the images.
Children’s Room at the Art Museum
Children’s Room: Arte EnTresSentidos (Art Between Senses / in Three Senses).
Permanent Installation at the main art museum in Colombia “Museo del Banco de la República de Colombia”
See more of this project by clicking here
Over one year, I did a study of the art collection of the museum and appropriated a series of works, translating their meanings, concepts and relationships to various art movements into an engaging pedagogical language, accessible to children visiting the museum. This project, titled “Arte EnTreSentidos” (“Art Between the Senses”/ “In Three Senses”), uses interactive objects and multimedia pieces that present the conceptual content of the project, being one of the first interactive rooms with free access to the public in Colombia.
As a complement to the project, I developed a program of guided visits and workshops that serve children between six and 12 years old, residents of severely marginalized and peripheral areas of the city, who are provided with free transportation to visit the museum.
Animations
Subject / Not / Subjected
Subject / Not / Subjected
Exhibition Valenzuela Klenner Gallery, Bogotá – Colombia
This show contains the projects “Re-fractions” and “Instants 301, 302, 303…” which were adapted for a solo exhibition in Bogota’s Valenzuela Klenner Gallery.
The gallery’s surveillance cameras are intercepted by a computer application that applies time delays on the video signals. It modifies the output video by merging multiple moments in the same image, causing a disorienting duplication of the space, time and reality.
Pre-texts:
