Ground Plan

- Installation (Installation)

Louisa Bufardeci

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Ground Plan by Louisa Bufardeci is a large-scale, digitally-printed, architecturally rendered, wall drawing that pictures the permitted global flow of the world’s population. Utilizing data from UNESCO, the national census, opinion polls, and the CIA World Factbook, Bufardeci presents each country as a room in a labyrinthine building. Each room is composed of sometimes incomplete walls, with open or closed doorways, in reflection of their border immigration policies; each room is scaled according to its population density. First produced in 2003, updated in 2009 (in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney) and here a proposed revision in 2022 for KADIST, this unique representation of the globe’s political stance on the rights of its citizens will offer a timely perspective on the current geopolitical shift we are facing in light of the rising dominance of China’s ideological views; India’s exploding population; Russian aggression against NATO; Middle Eastern shuffling of power between Israel and Iranian alliance; to name but a few. Bufardeci explains that when she began working on Ground Plan , she became interested in how statistics are used to tell particular stories about populations. Her experience fulfilling an employment survey for the Australian Bureau of Statistics as someone whose employment didn’t fit neatly into their categories made it clear to the artist how inadequate statistics are because they either misrepresented, or are unable to account for, people whose lives and experiences don’t fall into conventional categories. During a time in which the info-graphic has become the most marketable tool to communicate with (and govern) the masses, Bufardeci’s Ground Plan offers a compelling and stark representation of human movement, illuminating the impossibly violent injustice given witness in daily global news on the fate of millions suffering as climate refugees, political asylum seekers, conflict migration, ethnic atrocity and more. -Email conversation between artist and Zoe Butt, July 2022.

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Louisa Bufardeci is fascinated by the way our world is visually materialized through data measurement. Studying statistics, images, and sounds, Bufardeci turns such quantitative information into wall drawings, installations, and sculptures that challenge understandings of governing values, equality, taxation, export distribution, string theory, and ethnicity to the nation, among others. A “radical cartographer”, Bufardeci scours maps, charts, databases, official censuses, disciplinary reports, and surveillance tables in an effort to re-present how such information is recalled and controls our social, cultural, and political assumptions of society and its habitat. For example, in Bufardeci’s work, sound waves of anti-war speeches are pictured in needle-point tapestries; national flags are given four dimensions in hanging fabric; detention centers are eerily conceptualized as cold storage units. Bufardeci’s practice gives a unique insight into how the visualization of our reality conditions our judgments, and how the manipulation of data is too often the self-interested practice of governing bodies that far too often inculcates injustice and disenfranchisement, to the detriment of minorities, the environment, and culturally prejudiced.

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Colors:

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• data.n.01
• population.n.01
• technology.n.01
• architecture.n.01
• immigration.n.01
• geopolitics.n.01
• power.n.01