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EL SHOW DE LAS ESTRELLAS Vol.2

Performance. 2009

Sala de Proyectos. Universidad de los Andes

The "Boulevard de las estrellas" was inaugurated in 1986 by the colombian showman Jorge Baron. Some news articles about this:

Open publication - Free publishing - More periodicos

Archivo Valparaiso

Archivo Valparaiso was part of a recidency that took place in CRAC a Residency Center for Contemporary Artists located in Valparaiso, Chile.

MISCELANIA

The “Miscelanea”* series is a work that comes from my collections. One of my favorite is the gift wrapping papers collection. I collect cheap gift wrapping papers that call my attention due to their designs. Inside this collection there is a “special” selection: papers with printing errors, with smudge marks of ink, papers that show how color plates didn’t match when printing or when white spaces were left in a mistaken way. These imperfect papers, despite not reaching the “quality standards” that characterize products that come out for sale, manage to survive and sneak into the “perfect” gift wrapping papers that are on the market. In a culture that prioritizes “beauty” and cutting edge technology, these papers become a rarity that make perceptible the destructivity and transitoriness of today’s world.

The printing mistakes and the aesthetic values that entail “inaccuracy” and “mistake” interest me as they allow me to rethink and speculate about images. Each of the drawings that shape “Miscelanea” reproduce some kind of “mistake”, overlappings and/or juxtapositions. I draw them by hand, a practice that leads to the possibility of making other non-deliberated errors.

The patterns drawn are taken from things and objects that I recurrently spot and receive during my daily walks around my neighborhood, traces that are collected by my imagery as a sort of archive of my routine and relation to Bogotá, my city. House railings, stained glasses, houses facades and decorations, colored bricks, advertising flyers and promotional calendars are some of the traces that make part of this mnemonic collection and that are then turned into drawings. The most insignificant thing becomes valuable because it is a vestige of what my everyday events and experiences leave behind as a residual mark of their occurrence. It is a way to reconstruct a personal archive of my routine and my surroundings, of a time and a space.

The way these drawings are shown resembles the manner in which paper gift wrappings are exhibit at the local shops: hanged in structures made of wooden sticks and chains. In the last month I have been showing this drawings in my neighborhood stationary and miscelanea shops in an attempt to use alternative spaces for the artist work display in response to the lack of exhibition spaces for young emerging artists in Bogotá. I am returning the drawings back to place where they come from.



*A miscelania in Colombia is a small shop that sells a diverse amount of merchandise, that doesn’t limit to a determined line of products. For example, it is possible to find stationary goods, make-up and beauty supplies as well.


Some detail views of the drawings:

view of some details
Ink and marker pens on paper

EL SHOW DE LAS ESTRELLAS Vol.1

In the 80's Jorge Barón, an important Colombian TV presenter, media personality and businessman decided to give Bogotá city a boulevard imitating Hollywood's Hall of Fame. With this, he intended to keep alive in people's memory some Colombian public figures - symbols of identity - by printing their names in the center of some stars placed in one of the main sidewalks of the city. It's been almost 30 years since its inauguration and nowadays, with the pass of time, the boulevard has become almost completely forgotten.

Ignored by the pedestrians and hidden by the new constructions, the stars that at some point were a reason of proudness for the honored artist and the local community, today are only a proof of transitoriness. They are the attempt of simulating something that us, Colombians, understand as beautiful and glamorous but that isn't inherent to us. Decadence has seized the place leaving fragments of an unfinished attempt of shaping identity. In this imperfect copy -clumsy reflection of a reality that doesn't belong to us- the resemblance makes evident the inversion of reality: the pretended glamour is showed through decadence, memory is forgotten; it turns to be the perfect negative of a foreign positive.

Through this work, made in collaboration with Carlos Monroy (Hago Luego Existo group), we intend to rescue the memory. Seeking a medium that allowed us to enhance the idea of negative, reflection and oblivion by avoiding the faking of reality, we decided to use 'frottage'. This not very popular -almost obsolete- medium allowed us to go past the stars one more time, not ignoring them but making evident their failed attempt of being a copy, resulting as a parody of paradigms and fragments of identity. All of this is made visible by the dirt that has gather through time in the stars as the subtle proof of a forgotten history.



As part of this project a performance is going to take place in the following months. We are going to clean and polish the remaining stars, gathering people's attention by delivering a red-carpet worth seeing show.

The frottage and performance video are going to be exhibited together with some press releases and video clips of the inauguration of the boulevard in 1986 (found while making the pertinent research) at the Sala de Proyectos of Universidad de los Andes in august of 2009.

More about 'El Show de las Estrellas':

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FLUJO DIFUSIONAL

Project proposal for a work

This work aims to generate a reflection towards space and time displacement through the possible intersection dynamics of the narrative conditions of image, scenery and sound.

-It is planned to be realized with 3 video beams located in different places of the exhibition room, each one of them projecting, in a simultaneous and synchronized way, a different video recording.
-Each of this videos shows a different space where a different person performs an action. However, the 3 video beam projections will converge in one single spot of the room.
-The images shall be displayed in scale 1:1 and matching up the horizon lines of the space projected with the room's floor line.
-Some of the objects showed in the video recordings will also be placed in the exhibition room, matching their position with the one of the projected image.

...:¨:...:¨:...:¨:... words and kilometers ...:¨:...:¨:...:¨:...

This work consists in collecting all the chat conversations that I have had with my closest people who are living in a city different than mine. I print them, cut line by line and then glue one after another to build a thread of conversations (so far I have 1,5 km approximately), in this way I reconstruct talks that have allowed me to keep in touch but that, at the same time, remind me of the insufficiencies of this kind of communication. The long line of words seems to be infinite and in an attempt to prove its capacity of bringing me closer to those who are far away I start to walk and pull out the thread following the direction of the location of each one of them. However, the words thread falls short. From the 8519,08 kilometers that separate me from Barcelona, I have only walked 39.553 words.

*I participated with this work in the exhibition 'Y el amor ¿cómo vá? at Galeria Santafe (located inside Bogotá' s Planetarium) in 2008. The day of the exhibitions opening the whole work was destroyed by the public, as carried by the curiosity, they started to pick up the thread of paper to read what was in them and some of the people even took pieces of conversations back home. This I didnt expected, this I didn’t intend to bring about. My first reaction wasnt possitive at all, I was angry with the gallery that allowed the destruction of my work, I was angry with the people that didn’t care about braking the long thread of paper that took me weeks to build, I was angry at me for being so naive.
As the days passed the work started changing, as well as my attitude towards the whole experience. I decided to leave the work without my intervention, without fixing it back, just flowing with the visitors interventions as I realized that in some way that reaffirmed my reflections towards the impossibility and fragility of virtual communication. This experience brought to my head lots of common, long established, but still valid questions about art, public and participation.

..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..:¨:..

I ♥ F

proyecto

Maravilloso Mundo

Untitled
Nail polish on wood
10 x 16 cm
2007

This series of paintings.

To see more on this paintings click in the catalog below:

Nail polish on wood
10 cm x 10 cm
2007-2009

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Fosiles (Extintos)

Untitled (Munich fossil)
Acrylic on Canvas
54 x 125 cm
2007

This paintings come from the images of old product labels that I found during my research for the "Detalles en Amenaza" series. These are details that were threatened and replaced by condensed catchy logos and now are extinct.


To see more images of this "Fossils" Paintings click in the catalog below:

Detalles en Amenaza

Untitled (Moscatel)
Acrylic on canvas
88 x 96 cm
2006

The "Menaced Details" is a series of paintings that I started in 2006 and still goes on. I have been collecting labels of daily consumed products (beer, chocolate, etc.) that catch my attention due to their graphics, whose aesthetics don't seem to belong to a world that values impact, instantaneity, velocity and high quality. I am interested in details that imitate hand made illustrations, heraldic figures, little laces, bones and ornaments, that opposed to the catchy condensated logo, demand time and attention to be contemplated. This details seem threteaned by iconic references to pleasure and immediacy, and by appropiating, enlarging and reproducing this imagens I intend to stop and take time reflecting on them. This iconic elements act as traces of memory that show in a visual way some characteristics, shifts and desires of Colombian economy, culture and society.

To see more images of the "Menaced Details" series paintings, click on the calalog below:

To read more about the "Menaced Details" series, click on the text below (only available in spanish):