sábado, 26 de mayo de 2012



Ambares is a project elaborated within the Thesis Research:
Ambares: A Recomposition of The Exotic for Online Sharing

The Research analyses paradoxical relations between Experience and Image, the crafting of territories of identity/alterity in Social Network Sites and the collective project of redefining and sharing The Exotic through them. The research interrogates through artistic practice the current use of The Exotic in the Image-based world of Social Network Sites.


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To the Visitors:

Most of the places you know, you don’t know. There are many distant little towns that you have seen on screens, but haven’t really visited.  However, through images, they come to exist in your internal geography, in your constellation, in your image-world. Then, you have a new place without knowing it and in your daily escapes, in your tropical dreams, it becomes a possible somewhere else.
Most of the times you run away in the everyday; routine is fueled with Exotic remedies. These places are floating always there, like a colorful cloud on top of a monochrome landscape.

The Exotic Place is a recombination of a collective dream; a violent jumble of fantasies. It lives within the folding and refolding of geography; within a chaotic implosion of territories. The Exotic is carefully crafted to be a mirror of difference and flashing distance. The most powerful experience is that of fantasizing. The most turbulent creation is that of Geography.



































jueves, 24 de mayo de 2012







Stage/Backstage





















About Ambares The city


Ambares is a city that was born out of other city. It is important to remember, that it might be just a mirror of the other one; it is shaped out of the ideas of the other. Ambares echoes the colorful cloud that always floats on top of the other city, formed with puffs of what is missing and missed.

Ambares City is crafted out of the imaginary of another city, pulled out of what the other sees as the other. Not only that, its manufactured with the run-away desires of the everyday. Every place has maybe a photographic negative, a cut out surface, which then flies around like a ghost suffering its exile in transparency.

Ambares came through in my head because I see relations, more than ideas. I see places existing within others. I see a Scrumpled Geography[1], where places are shades, more than territories; they are shadows, dusts, presences that crumble upon each other. In circles of water, places echo one another like caves imploding into an infinite granite and rain collapse.  

Ambares, in itself is not so simple, since its exotic ways are themselves a recombination of a collective dream; it is a violent jumble of fantasies.  Ambares is a fractured mirror; it shows fragmented reflections pulled together through an unexplained composite force.

            Ambares is not a simple place, because in essence it’s a tight folding and refolding of others. However, the very truth about Ambares is that it is not a single place, but many. Yet it brings together what here is means there.  It tries to collect the poetics of the distance and desire in a chaotic spirit.  

In the search of this mirrored place, as a place only existing within another, I took the task of extracting and stirring bits and pieces of The Exotic place; the febrile rumor of undecipherable pleasure.

Ambares The City is a place like this: 

While walking you confuse reality screens. You can hardly tell weather something is an image or space in depth. You see through a window to see a landscape (which is in fact a painted wall with other windows to other 'landscapes'). Everything is dressed up in 'somewhere else'.

Most of the walls are painted with images of other places and other walls holding other images of places: It an earthly-casted image-place labyrinth.
Depth-screens-windows all in one collapse and everywhere is everywhere.

And Everywhere is multicolor, reversed, complicated.

The City has opacities, transparencies, shadows, hallucinations, ghosts and all the shades of presence. Its not like things are or are not. Almost being, they all walk around. So when you walk, there are many degrees of doing so.

Image-places are interposed and crisscrossing. There are also shades of smoke, smoked shadows, glass curtains. There is sometimes a sweet howling on the non-distance.

The important thing is that you are surrounded by overlapping layers of landscapes and names. There might be some witches at home dressing up every space with other.  

So on the outside you see snow, then to the inside a jungle sprout, then you follow on, it turns out to be a saloon. Then I give you a little box, that is nothing outside, and inside there is a little adventure.

This is an accidentally hyper modeled and scenified city. Here is an implosion of choreographies, of postage stamps, air portraits, of recomposed geographies. All of them set with the calculation of luck.

The space is to be lived *in fugitive mode*. Its all spaced by images.  In every direction there are framings over frames and framings. It results in cathartically multiplying arcades of color. 

Yet, in spite its complicated nature of place-image collapse, Ambares is all a broken colorful town, where time sits carefully.
Yet the death of the afternoon bothers no one, because its still Tropical and lost.
Yet there is a lady smiling bringing fresh flower tea. There is the wonder of simplicity, and the baroque feel of improvisation facing scarcity.

The light colors the flying dust; there is a curtain of sunshine and it is hypnotizing.

Yet the nights are infinitely embracing. The air is scented and lubricated with chance bliss.  Yet the people pass through life as warriors and victims, who work hard and sleep deeply.

Yet you can go barefooted to different seas, starting to walk at a single point.
Coasts are behind brick walls you wouldn't suspect.

Yet Ambares is the place you wear the flowery dress that never turns out to be the right one in other days. You can sit during a fruity breakfast with the legs criss-crossed is unusual ways; you legs feel the bottom of the chair made with palm tree leafs. Its not completely comfortable, but the texture is very alive.
In that moment it is also worth staring at the lady who feeds the birds while giving them new names like she does everyday.

In Ambares your shoulders are roasted. The Dry is cured.


[1] Term borrowed from the Essay “Un-glunking geography: spatial science after Dr Seuss and Gilles Deleuze” written by Marcus A. Doel found in the book Thinking Space (see References).




















Backstage//