48,8 x 60,3 cm
This series of photographs is part of the body of work Allora & Calzadilla made regarding the situation in Vieques, an island off the mainland of Puerto Rico used for the 60 years by the U. S Military and NATO forces to practice military bombing exercises. In 2000, they began a collaboration with the local activists to make the campaign more visible. Having added cast rubber reliefs of their slogans and designs to the soles of their shoes, the activists stamped their protest on the reclaimed land. By slightly manipulating everyday objects to become communication tools, Allora & Calzadilla had created “mobile print-making machines” (Yates McKee, October 133, Summer 2010). They then photographed the ephemeral aftermath of these mark-making actions. Like graffitied walls, the details of these impressions on sandy grounds are landscapes of dissent, willing the transition of propriety back to the inhabitants. In Land Mark #10, numerous footsteps with long statements stamp their resentment in different confused orientations. Such a beach scene might at first misleadingly be associated with a playful holiday snap. The fragility, uncertainty and relentlessness of this struggle is poetically summarized in this close-up of meaningful site-specific expression. The artists wrote: “How is land differentiated from other land by the way it is marked? Who decides what is worth preserving and what should be destroyed? What are the strategies for reclaiming marked land? How does one articulate an ethics and politics of land use?” (in Land Mark, de Tokyo, Paris, 2006).
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla comprise the artistic duo Allora & Calzadilla. Their work often takes the form of performances, installations, and sound pieces that refer to sociopolitical phenomena and history. Forms from these spheres of life—an overturned tank, a treadmill, a piano—are displaced and spliced together in new configurations, often with performers or viewers engaging with these material segments of the world.
Weekly Southeast Asia Radar: Puja Pantai in Selangor; young Cambodian singers talk old music | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Radar AP January 16, 2020 ArtsEquator’s Southeast Asia Radar features articles and posts about arts and culture in Southeast Asia, drawn from local and regional websites and publications – aggregated content from outside sources, so we are exposed to a multitude of voices in the region...
In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with...
This installation combines the display of real objects with the deceptively painterly amalgamation of their content as the subject of a photograph...
This series of photographs is part of the body of work Allora & Calzadilla made regarding the situation in Vieques, an island off the mainland of Puerto Rico used for the 60 years by the U...
Stretching between San Pedro and the beach in Altata, Sinaloa, there is a 40 km road where there are three invisible borders controlled by rivalling armed groups...
The Territory is not for sale is a process of reflection and research with people, thinkers and community leaders from Usme, a rural part of Bogotá on the tenuous verge of becoming urban...
These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...
Butter Mountain is part of an ongoing series of works that combines a sense of painterly mass and substance with sculptural language to examine the synergy between a topographical landscape and a landscape of the human condition...