In 2015 I completed a photographic book featuring over 30 cities from around the world both in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The book has been divided in half, with each part touring the world and moving in the opposite direction than its counterpart. The Royal Academy holds a copy of the “Sur – South” portion of the book. Mounted on the last page of this copy is a photograph showing the cover and interior of the book prior to it being divided into two halves, below which is inscribed in pencil: `Norte es Sur – 2015. Royal Academy of Arts.’
Artist’s book consisting of one sheet folded in a concertina format with colour photographic prints of a hand holding a lens in front of a horizon. The photographs are printed upside down, but the portion of the horizon seen through the lens appears the right way up. The location (city or town and country) depicted in each photograph is written upside down in black on the hand holding the lens, between the thumb and forefinger. With a miniature version of the images in concertina form measuring 5 cm x 5 cm loosely inserted.
Buckminster Fuller once said: “the universe does not have an up of down, but only in an out”, and Newtown’s definition of gravity describes a force that attracts two bodies t o a common center… This photographic series is a poetic exploration of the duality between Northern and Southern hemispheres, or cardinal geography, which often become inaccurate and politicized ways to depict the vast world we live in. These two books departed from London in 2015 and have been moving in different directions. The books are currently on display, at the same time and in two different exhibition space located in different places across the planet.
The first version of the project includes 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.This 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 Perez, 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 Galvo Hersan, Sao Paulo – Brazil
Paola Uribe, Yemen
Carlos Mario Camacho, Colombia