Brief Description of the Webart work of Claudia Sandoval Romero
Two pieces produced during as a guest student in KHM, Cologne, 2010, “Holograms of Deportation” and “Lost Memories” In “Holograms of Deportation” three portraits of deported people are taken from the internet to create three dot matrix holograms. These holograms were placed on the walls of Berlin, being exposed to the interaction of the pedestrians. The portraits belong to three deported people from Germany and only during a certain time of the day, when the daylight hits in the proper angle, the simple mirrors reproduce the images of the deported, showing them as a sort of ghosts brought back to Germany.
“Immigrants” consists in the register of an image left around Vienna.
“Lost Memories” is a movie made of the images of Thaissa’s life in Germany. Thaissa is a Brazilian who was deported and the movie of her life, this is, her memories, disappears when the interactors click on the images in the web. The piece was part of a performance done in KHM where the students participated helping in the disappearance of the memories of Thaissa, this is, collaborating with the pass of time through their participation. This way, the mere act of the passive appreciation of the piece points to the silent responsibility of those who don’t participate actively in combating the social issue.
In “Passport” falsified passports are offered as a product of an online contest. Voting on the pictures of passports from France, Cuba, Colombia, Russia and USA, begins a discussion about transits and nationalities.
The project “Missing”, 2009, is an answer to the violence without a recognizable face, and to a conflict without shape, that have taken numerous victims in Latin America and around the world.
“Coyote”, 2009, is a manual to cross the North American border from Mexico. The manual has being built trough the 25 interviews that were done to illegal aliens in the United States.
“Sammlung” is a fake mirror image of the museum’s website Kah-Bonn. Adding the link “Sammlung”, this is, adding, in a virtual reality, a collection to the museum. In this occasion the link leads to paintings done by orangutans and questions the institutional image of the museums in the web. The site had initially the domain kah-bonn.co.de At the same time, my inquiries about photography and its context brought me to developed a research about the place that photography occupies when used as part of multimedia art pieces for the internet.
“Scarring” consists in passing via e-mail an image of a woman with a scar in her stomach, which, hand by hand, is intervened by the participants’ personal discourses. The project is an allegory of intervening the web with a collective, already healed wound, and proposes to taking into consideration how the web has radicalized the fight for creative rights, forgetting authorship in contrast to the numerous actions developed when copyrights are violated. The work’s intention is to point to a free use of resources in the internet while evidencing artist’s conscious loss of control. An intervention half done in the virtual world of the internet and half a urban intervention, is the piece “Healing Cotton Balls”, São Paulo, 2008. The work was done during the seminar Public Interventions of Antoni Muntadas and is a collaborative project with Marrikka Trotter from Harvard.
This small-scale intervention was intended to respond to a common strategy of threshold defense in Sao Paulo. The intervention consisted in temporarily appropriate an aggressive infrastructure with a small act of gentleness and delight. The relation performance-registry is taken to a next step when photographic material is posted in a blog continuing with the action in a virtual sphere were it can still grow.
The project “Living Cemetery”, 2008-2013, is a web invitation to belong to a community where participants reflect about their own death, leaving a document for their last wishes in the web. And at the same time their images are used to illustrate their personal and virtual grave, also compound by their epitaph.
The piece “OVO”, 2009, consisted in the online transmission in real time of the 21 days that an egg takes until its hatching. Here, a new reading on Viola’s action is offered, taking the discussion to the matter of time, comparing the always-accelerated concept of time lived inside the internet, contrasting it to biological time, impossible to be forced or accelerated. At the same time “OVO” questions web art, where things must always happen satisfying interactors’ desire of action, in contrast to other kind of processes hidden to the human vision.
Other works developed for the web are “Caloto”, 2009, that consisted in a workshop about digital photography, writing and blogs, done with the 25 students of the Nucleo Rural Caloto, located in the violent rural area of Cauca, Colombia. The workshop reflected about the region and the lives of the teenagers and offered new technologies as tools to create a collective identity. |
