Pictures of my trip to Costa Rica

I feel problems now a days for me are: digital world and lack of appreciation for nature

I feel the world degrading. Technology brings you facility and time, it makes you forget about what we really are, humans. I feel we are heading toward a digital world where we are most likely to be acting all the same. 

Usually people here in Latin America dream about going to Europe or the US because of its development and  new opportunities, big metropolis, new thing to get, and I confess I have feel the same way too. But I have also met people who want to come to Latin America because of the pureness of the place, where things still work as they used to years and years ago, a less develop country, full of nature. Last summer I went to Costa Rica, we went up the coast of Guanacaste Peninsula though all the beaches. I can say its one of the most beautiful places I have visited, everything was so not humanized , so natural, it was you and mother nature. But I was surprised to find that most of the people that live there were Europeans. It was like a little group of European found paradise and had stayed there ever since, and that is actually their explanation for living there. I remember talking to an Italian women who own a small restaurant, she was surprised that we, people actually from Latin America, were there since usually there are only european tourists. I remember she said ” what happens is that we want what you have and you want what we have”, and she is right people tend not to appreciate what is in front of them. Im curious to know how you feel about Latin America?  

How can  a piece of jewelry create a reaction on others? how can we make them appreciate/consider nature?  I’m interested in a physical art object that can bring a possibility of change, connecting art to the larger world. 

Hello Agnieszka! your post is really interesting, it gave me a lot to think of. I saw Francis Alÿs work, its poetic act creates meaning, it reminded me of performance art.

“Performance art can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer’s body and a relationship between performer and audience. It is opposed to painting or sculpture, for example, where an object constitutes the work.” It will be interesting to blend both, and make an object that constitutes the work but its also involved with the body provoking a relationship and reaction on the public; the reaction is the deciding factor of the art.

I was looking at artist Tanaka Atsuko (1932–2005) was a pioneering Japanese avant-garde artist.
“Her best-known work is “Electric Dress”, invented in 1956, a burqa-like costume consisting of electrical wires and lit-up coloured lightbulbs. Tanaka wore the dress to exhibitions. Her inspiration for her signature work “Electric Dress” was from a pharmaceutical advertisement illuminated by neon lights. The bulky garment expresses the body’s circuitry, and acts like a costume. Here, the work lights up sporadically, giving off the sensation of an alien-like creature. According to the Gutai artists, Tanaka’s work symbolized post war Japan’s rapid transformation and urbanization[2]. When Tanaka wore her dress for the first time, her face and hands were the only visible subject. She had noticed the trepidation when she had worn it and flipping the switch: “I had the fleeting thought: Is this how a death-row inmate would feel?”
She made this piece in reaction to the problems she was dealing at the time, what are our problems right now?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

border zone

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

when a border starts and ends ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic, The Green Line. Francis Alÿs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Corinne Silva, ‘Demarcation line number 3, Desert Springs golf resort’ 2009

Maria!

Here are the pictures I wanted to show you.

Agnieszka

Dear Maria,

Time is going so FAST! Unfortunately I have problems with uploading images. So it will be only text this time. I will mail pictures to you.

The grey area is a condition or a place, which I do not feel comfortable to be in. It is not a place where choices are easy. The first picture comes to mine mind is a border zone, a danger place to be depending on circumstances.  Borders are interesting, how do we define them, when they start and end?

Looking for images for borders I found interesting work of Francis Alÿs a Belgium artist living and working in Mexico City.His project Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic, The Green Line. 2004 -2005 creates an interesting view on borders. The work is about the Palestinian and Israeli conflict but I think it contains some universal values and many layers.

 In June 2005 Alÿs walked from one end of Jerusalem to the other carrying a can filled with green paint. The bottom of the can was perforated with a small hole, so the paint dripped out as a continuous squiggly line on the ground as he walked. The route he followed was one drawn in green on a map as part of the armistice after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, indicating land under the control of the new state of Israel. The original Green Line has since been considerably altered on the ground, with cataclysmic consequences for people on both sides.*

*http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/arts/design/13chan.html

Alÿs performance was filmed and shown at galleries to people with different backgrounds as a departure of discussion. Reactions were of course very diverse!

I found this comment about Alÿs action on:

http://simonsteachingblog.files.wordpress.com

 “‘It’s also really wonderful because sometimes we get locked into how we see. It is a problem that the world doesn’t hear our story [the Palestinian story], isn’t it? Or our story gets manipulated, and turned on its head, but there is also a problem that we become stuck in the ways that we see things over and over again. So it’s also really wonderful to have somebody coming who is not coming to aggressively say who we are, or what things are, but is making an empathetic act, and at the same time is pushing us to maybe see things or to think about things in different types of ways. And the other part of it, I think, is that things here are so saturated and over determined in terms of representation and discourse, power and politics, that it’s extremely hard to find a way to break through that, in any way. I think poetic acts are one way of breaking through that.’

 So the question is how can our collaboration (in the grey area) turn in to that kind of result, poetry and politics is this a good way? How can we create work, which makes difference, invite to dialog, open our mind and others? 

Agnieszka