El Laboratorio Arte Alameda y la Asociación

Brief:

The other day - Markovic went on in the same tone- I thought of
something while I watched TV in a hotel. Men from the antiquity
looked at the same landscape all their life, or most of it. Because
the road was so long, even the traveler did, and that made him
think about the road itself. Now, however, everything is so fast.
Highways, trains... Even the TV shows many landscapes in just a few
seconds. There is no time to ponder anything. Some call that the
uncertainty of the territory.

Pérez-Reverte, Arturo, El Pintor de Batallas, 2006:68-69

    For the human eyes, the territories began mutating at greater speed
with the advent of Modernity. Further on, and due to the globalized
economy, the geopolitical dialectics, the allocation of ‘privileges’
within the power structures, and the new politics of mobility -caused
by resource wars and climate challenges- the perception of space have
turned more fluid and porous, constantly relocating the individuals from
micro (i.e. refugee camps, detention centers, closed communities) to
macro spaces (multi-nations, zones, etcetera).

In this flux, an exchange between deterritorialization to
multiterritorialization is at play so quickly that the capacity to
react overcomes the capacity to stop and see, to stop and think. In
which landscape is one immersed in? Has it changed? In which way is it
affecting us? How are we affecting others? Are we producing in synergy?
Will art history become a compendium of (represented, presented,
enacted, lived) battles in tension?

The illusion of distance, as opposed to proximity, is connected with
space and time economics. What one experience and is immersed in becomes
its only accessible reality. It also produces the sense that the
encountered problematics are exclusively local and disconnected from
others, being the figure of ‘the neighbor’ the closest referential point.
But distance weights more when it is mental than when it is physical.
It allows to pervade hegemonic models without questioning them -what is
consider as north or as south, as exceptional or barbaric, as developed
or undeveloped, and so on. Do boundaries are still perceived as
barriers? Or as possibilities for meeting, exchanges, and negotiations.

In this context, the greek concept‘parallaxis’ is explored as a metaphor
(remembering Joyce, Karatani, and Žižek) that confronts the one-sided
and reductionist approach towards our being-in-the-world. It functions
as a tool that enables, through a continuous repositioning of our
referents, to ‘map’ the terrain we inhabit. Thus, the exchange and
latent capacities that it entails become the perfect alibi to explore
the potentialities of (re)imagining the commons.