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(C) 2015 Maria Trabulo. Photograph: Solmaz Farhang

The View from the Border

Maria Trabulo
2015
Installation

What we see with our eyes is as important as what observes us.
The presented images were harvested from the internet between March and May 2015, through an intensive process of collecting. They are sourced from webcams that are located at borders between European states and between land and ocean (or sea). An exercise in contemplating the geographical and political limits of the territory where the piece takes place: Europe.

There, where I am, from where I observe, I see nothing. Enclosing the spectator within a landscape constructed from the borders of the European continent, the piece provides a false experience of being within the limits of a territory.

It is a situation that bifurcates our experience, imposing to our eyes, the view towards the other side. We observe another territory, we observe the other side of a territory and at the same time we observe our own limits. Finally, we observe the viewing point of the other one; he or she who installs the camera and decides what to film, and the one who collects.
The piece becomes an attempt of a dialogue between the spectator and the concrete but unknown territories, and an attempt of a failed “epic” gesture to seek to represent each border of the European continent.
Thus, the piece can become an eternal process whilst transforming its images to eternity: the people, animals, landscapes and situations that are transmitted in real time through the internet. The present temporality of these film shots, as well as its naïve existence, become altered by the gesture of crystalising them digitally and later into slide film (this alluding to the past and its mechanisms). Thus, this project constitutes an eternal portrait of habits, customs, landscapes, images and identities of a vast territory, and how these chose to represent themselves on that other vast territory that is the internet.

Fact Box

The View from the Border
Categories
Date
May 26, 2015