Notes on artists and works on exhibition
Susan Black. Heaven on Earth, 2001
The artist finds inspiration in the poetry of America's suburban architecture to shape her particular vision of California's urban landscape. The bungalows of Palm Springs re-read through the senses. The houses are inverted, and form and volume acquire a new density, an unsettling three-dimensionality. The sky passes to the earth and the earth occupies the sky. This reversal provokes in us a dreamlike, hyperreal, mental sensation of journeying.
Elena Näsänen. Photograph of the Sea, 2002
Souvenir snaps of a journey, a broken glass, and a desperate departure from home. Heavy breathing. A run along the beach to shed a burden. Wilderness. The force of the waves. An escape towards life. Memory becomes an ‘inner journey'.
Ximena Cuevas. Turistas, 2002
Ximena Cuevas' vision of the quotidian in society is a blend of critique, irony and humour. Her attention is turned this time to the figure of the ‘traveller' and the transformation of tourism since its glory days in the 19th century to the phenomenon of mass tourism that we have today, at the dawn of the 21st century, and which shows no signs of abating as modern technology redefines the map of global mobility.
Ingrid Buchwald Eguia. Capri c'est fini, 2005 / La temporada baja es para hibernar, 2005
Two subtle yet powerful digital animations from this young creator who draws with video. In Capri c'est fini, an ice-cream vendor has just shut up shop and the awning is flapping in the wind. The caravan stands stranded at Europe's western-most cape, in Portugal. The multi-lingual sign, a lure for the tourists, seems like a melancholy witness of a bygone era.
La temporada baja es para hibernar shows the Tarik building in the Portuguese city of Portimão which has a life cycle like that of a bear: empty and inert for most of the year, it awakes in spring at the start of the tourist season, briefly decking itself out in colourful awnings and towels before reverting to its dull and dreary state for the rest of the year.
Sally Gutiérrez. Song Lines, 2005
A train journey and a bus journey, juxtaposed. Moving or still pictures of people immersed in the rhythm of the city. A dense urban fabric is formed by visual anecdotes and impressions, simultaneously intimate and global, seen from the distance marked by the windowpane. This superb audiovisual project looks at the concept of movement and constant transit of the individual in the urban environment. The complete project is composed of a video installation, documentary videos, drawings, and photographs.
Tere Recarens. Etc., 2002 / Besenrein, 2003
On her first night in Berlin, the artist discovers at a party that her name -‘Tere'- means ‘hello' in Estonian. The discovery prompts her to undertake a journey to Estonia with the object of meeting and interacting with the inhabitants of that country. With intelligence and humour, the piece discusses intercultural communication and the tension between the notions of ‘traveller' and ‘tourist'.
Who has not dreamed, whilst looking out from an airplane window, of being able to sit on a cloud, or clear it away with a sweep of the hand? In the video-action Besenrein, the artist manages to realise this poetic operation.
Eder Santos. A Europa em 5 Minutos, 1986
Basing himself on fragments of a real tourist's travel videos, in this fictional documentary Santos reflects on the ‘domestic language' of Super 8 films and the political aspects of cultural documentation. The film, with its shaky pictures of Paris, Rome, and London shot in Super 8 and voice-over by a 78 year-old Brazilian tourist, shows how image technology reduces the cultural experience to cliché tourist sights and landmarks. ‘Home-made films', made in the style of travelogues or travel documentaries, are interspersed with pictures of filmmakers and other professionals of the audiovisual medium talking about the art of working with Super 8.
Fernando Llanos. 360° (videoviaje), 2001
A camera revolves, gradually spanning the 360 degrees of the horizon. This piece is part of a series called videoviajes, or ‘video travels', which the artist has been putting together over the past few years and in which Llanos's theoretical ideas concerning the videographic image are interlaced with his personal experiences of the journeys undertaken. The use of geometry and light endows the work with such artistic potency that this ultimately prevails over all other meanings and imposes its own poetry.
Xoán Anleo. Paisaxes para o olvido (Viraxe), 2006
The constant shower of flashes coming from cameras, mobile phones and video recorders associated with organised, mass tourism is a sign of our obsession for recording any and everything new or different. Modern gadgetry encourages this action by allowing us to multiply images endlessly and indulge our voracious appetite for pressing the button. Filmed in Patagonia, "Una ya no es suficiente" (One is no longer enough) is a sharp visual reflection on this superfluity of inane snapshots.
Daniel Cuberta. ¿Qué hago yo aquí?, 2007
Daniel Cuberta's latest series of video-poems repeats the format of the visual notebook used in previous works. A rapid and fluid succession of images illustrates the artist's account of a moving journey made in search of love. Airports and planes are seen through a sentimental prism. His approach, in his own words, is to "look carefully at the things that move and the things that are still, and narrate them in a film."
