Vera Schoepe uses Photography among other types of media to articulate a message very much rooted in her experience. US / Them here selected is the result of the time she spent in two cities of the borderland region between Mexico and the USA. The final installation project includes not only photography but also sound, documents, and text, mostly testimonies of people including immigrants and social activists that palliate the social wearing out on both sides of the border. In Schoepe’s work, photography used to plays an ambiguous role that prevents the viewer from recognizing the territory he sees. Quite the opposite, this series of images creates a sort of mirage. Images of one city then keep sending you back to images of the other side. In her constant walk across this border, Vera Schoepe shows to what extent the cities of Ciudad Juarez and El Paso are two sides of the same coin. Her work leaves us without any bearings. The viewer can find himself lost and confused, incapable of knowing on which side of the border he is looking. In the end, what the artist point at is that the possibility of understanding of the whole situation comes not so much from a portrait or a landscape but from the oral history behind the place: the voices of the residents of this region who live in between, in the gap created by the border.
US / THEM – Between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, USA
Born to a family of mixed origins, Vera Schoepe is naturally inclined to use Photography and other Art media to question and document border identities.
This series of images accompanied by text is part of a larger installation called Je suis la frontière (I am the border) which encompasses a growing archive of audio and visual documents that explore the complexity of living in the US – Mexico borderland. The whole archive constitutes a personal cartography of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, two cities that are at the same contiguous but divided by four international bridges.
Last year, this project served as a backdrop to a series of creative writing workshops organized for youths living in local transition homes in Marseille. This event eventually led to the creation of a series of portraits at the Foyer de la Gare de Saint Charles called « Sans Repères » (Without bearings).
In her work, Vera seeks to challenge the limited and biased information that the media gives us about certain places in the world. She believes in approaching those places by listening to individuals, following their steps, and walking on the streets. She thus hopes to create a personal cartography of a place and to give presence to the voices and life stories behind the sometimes overwhelming statistics.
Aleix Plademunt’s approach to landscape is rooted in his reading of the signs and symbols he encounters. His reading is careful and detailed and centres on the action of man and its relationship to landscape. In that sense, Dubai appears as a very symptomatic place that is quite transparent about the social and ideological characteristics that have determined the artificial construction of its landscapes. Since such processes are happening all throughout the world, increasingly melting the idiosyncrasy of previously different cities in one single mode, the core reflection in Dubailand, as in many other projects by Plademunt, does not deal so much with topos, about the place, as much as about its process of dissolution. And thus, it is about the difficulty to keep reading and talking this universal language that Plademunt considers as the mother tongue that constitutes landscape or what he describes as our first way of communication before the first signs and symbols. Maybe his projects also talk about the need to finally assume what the symptomatic landscape of Dubai has to say about us.
My work reflects on different social attitudes, analyzed through the landscape.
There exists a direct relationship between man and nature. Nature speaks about us: about our attitudes, desires and concerns. We project ourselves onto nature. Nature is communicative and as a result of a culture’s relationship with it, we are able to analyze that culture, that society.
I am interested in the landscape when it has a direct relationship with the social, with us. I’m interested in analyzing the landscape from a present perspective, from the moment of history in which I am living. I’m questioning why I have found the landscape in this way, how we use it, how we move about in it, and what we understand by the term ‘landscape’. I like to communicate with the landscape and challenge it.
Dubai has had the privilege of being able to create a city from scratch, from nothing. The city has the space and money to enable it to realize the dreams of a society. The city speaks of the desires, hopes and habits of today’s society. A city was built by appropriating Western symbols and taking them to the extreme, to the limit. The result is a thematic and fictionalized city which in many cases borders on the absurd.
Although I took all pictures in Dubai, the reflection I extract from them is no longer local and becomes universal.
I understand Dubai as a generational and global reflection. It perform all our concerns, and the boundaries between Dubai, United States, Barcelona, Disney World and Egypt become more and more diffuse.
Acapulco is a place where you can’t say no. Elvis Presley said it this way in a song dating back to 1963 that had become popular a year earlier after the release of the movie Fun in Acapulco. In this installation project, the Mexican artist Pablo López Luz not only sheds light upon the topographic vision of different architectural structures and urban landscape but also to the classical imagery of a place full of glamour that has been vividly immortalized by the cinema and advertising industries. Such process developed along with increasing urban speculation and the wearing effect on society of drug trafficking and corruption. Lopez Luz’ approach to the city of Acapulco offers a double direction. On the one hand, he includes an analysis of landscape by pairing his own photography with local iconography dating from the 1950’s and 60’s (specially postcards, advertisements and movies). On the other, he deconstructs the visual codes of this material by adding a written narrative, a of chronological investigation of the 20th Century in Acapulco (based on texts from unknown writers, novels, journalistic articles, self-published diaries, and internet notes). By continuously intersecting the artistic, political, and social spheres of the city of Acapulco, the Mexican artist creates a sense of travelling in time. Overall, in this project, Pablo Lopez Luz offers a possible history of representation of this city, specially focusing on the impact of images and the residue that they leave on the collective imagery.
The idea behind the project Acapulco, was to comment on human nature, as well as its relationship to space, and its social and political implications.
By photographing the historic city of Acapulco (once the most important shipping and commercial ports in Latin America), I am not only trying to express a personal point of view, but also to play a role in the city’s visual history (Acapulco has been probably the most photographed city after Mexico D.F.).
Going back and forth between the original paradisiac conception of Acapulco, in the 1940’s and 50’s, to its present reality of overpopulation and extreme social disparity, I intended to shoot the landscapes that could better portray what I believe to be the essence of ths contemporary city, as well as its everyday-growing lack of distinctiveness.
It was also important for my personal photographic approach, to be confronted with the classic imagery of the port, therefore resulting in a conversation between the existing images – old postcards, social photographs, tourism guides, film stills – and the new proposed views of the place.
As a side project, a chronological investigation into 20th Century Acapulco was developed, based on texts from unknown writers, novels, journalistic articles, self-published diaries and internet notes, as well as a film cycle Postcards of Acapulco including historical movies, as well as Youtube clips.
This project by Pablo López Luz was selected by Marta Daho (Milan, 1969), a curator of photography who is currently responsible for exhibition and editorial projects at the University of Barcelona. Since 1995 Daho has curated a number of exhibition and editorial projects for internationally recognised institutions such as Magnum Photos where she was the Exhibition Director (2001 – 2005), the private contemporary art foundation Metrònom in Barcelona (1995 – 2001) or more recently for SCAN, and the Photography Festival based in Tarragona, Talent Latent ’08.
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