THE ECSTATIC TRAVEL

This project was presentad as a Thesis Project at Hunter College MFA, New York, 2013.

"The Ecstatic Travel" is a fictional digital travel through a contemporary digital plant archive that traces plant relationships to humans. The installation was
made with old institutional furniture found in Hunter College CUNY that were transformed in order to become cabinets that holded and illuminated a series of sex videos and a series of fake specimens.

The sound of the installation pretended to be an ethnographic recording, but actually is sound appropriated and abstracted from static running
machines and McDonald's ads to play with the idea of contemporary folklore. The Ecstatic Travel proposed a new ordering of things that affected the way of assimilating knowledge. It's a detour that forces the viewer to see and read information in a new way that is against linear readings. It tip in a new paradigm that tries to understand the non-human by proposing a new territory, which has its genealogies completely modified in relation to the real terrain.

These videos are hosted by abstract modernist furniture, assembled to fulfill an old botanical painting original function. An Indian painting of a palm that
was meant to be sent to Europe to be included in a Victorian furniture, but for some reason, didn't happen. It is painted in the miniature style, which was
forced to look as western botanical illustration. This image contains the complex genealogy of colonialism and domination in its impure visual traits.

In order to fulfill its original purpose to be included in Western furniture and to push this situation one step forward, I assembled fictional furniture, consisting
in found pieces of institutional office-style furniture at the Hunter MFA Building. This furniture hosts the palm image and at the same time it acts as a cabinet to host my subjective collection of artifacts and images of plants and rocks. The layers of the installation work as archaeological excavations of different systems that have failed to provide an accurate read of the non-human: Institutional structures that reflect an impossible order of the world in forms of furniture, cements rocks and corporate images of people relating to plants. The basic materials of the installation are inserted in the Western paradigm, but I have transformed them in order to estrange them. The furniture was flipped and re-arranged abstractly, the images of the videos were estranged through the magnification of their fragments. Similarly, the artifacts included in the collection are specimens that exist in between spaces; petrified wood that resembles rock, vegetal fossils that look like indigenous carved stones and real plants in front of fake landscapes.

The Ecstatic Travel proposes a new ordering of things that affect the way of assimilating knowledge. It's a detour that forces the viewer to see and read information in a new way that is against linear readings. It tips in a new paradigm that tries to understand the non-human by proposing a new territory, which
has its genealogies completely modified in relation to the real terrain. As the installation is anchored in 21st Century language, it raises questions such as which is the contemporary primitivism? Where is the new otherness, now that the whole planet is colonized? Which would be the analogue of the exotic that the XVII Century naturalists were looking at? I suspect that it has to do with the new systems that have appeared in the last years: The web, which is a complete ecosystem in itself and some of the few places that are physically banned for human beings such as Involuntary Parks. Those are the only places that resist nowadays tourist colonization. They are places that can only be accessed by images.Ecstatic Travel is a video installation that combines ancient and contemporary culture through a celebration of visual proximities to the living non-human. "The Ecstatic Travel Series" is a fictional digital travel through a contemporary digital plant archive that traces plant relationships to humans. The sound of the installation pretends to be ethnographic recording, but actually is sound appropriated and abstracted from static running machines and McDonald's ads to play with the idea of contemporary folklore.

The Ecstatic Travel, six channel video installation, institutional furniture and objects,
42th Street Gallery, Hunter College, 2013.

The Ecstatic Travel Series, HD videos, color, audio, variable lenghs, 2013.