Dublin. June 2020.
The Zone is a work whose conceptualisation was developed as a final project for the MFA Art in the Contemporary World, run by the National College of Art and Design of Dublin, Ireland. It engages a digital installation accessible through a shareable Google Drive link, where some sounds, GIF images and documents appear to embody uncertain spatial practices of some elements of the city of Dublin.
The Zone resumes the research I engaged in the MFA Art in the Contemporary World during the academic year 2019-2020. In accordance to the own features of this final project, such a research often followed dispersed, intuitive, and most of the times, unanticipated, paths. The Zone became a sort of reflective, uncertain place, from where to reflex on the current convulsive events taking place around it and around me, by providing the distance, the security, and the freedom, needed to do so. The Zone is found apart from the world, the reality, as well as apart from any kind of activism, explicit political claim, or blaming allocation, whilst remaining unavoidably bounded to them. If individual’s roles and agencies cannot be easily located and allocated within the global system picture, The Zone brings the possibility to becoming whilst being in displacement through such a picture.
The Zone is a spatial disconnection that holds an inner set of dispositions and logics. This work hides and masks the relationship it maintains with the everyday life, the real, or, if preferred, that outside the sphere of art and its conventions. This often causes a disorientation and uncertainty about what of the summarised by The Zone is real or fictional, which is its reading key, and which are the order and hierarchy between elements that should be considered. The hunch that there may be many ways to understand The Zone infects the visitor like a virus of the shared Drive folder, and it is precisely the metaphor of a virus what makes the structure of The Zone work.
The visitor will encounter different folders and files inside The Zone. Available in the Google Drive unit, they are just the beginning of the unfolding of The Zone, and such unfolding is not finished. There are few reasons to this. The first one addresses one of the keystone-concepts of this work, and it is that every space, without mattering its sort, is created and re-created by the spatial practices it can hold. Thus, The Zone will never be finished, since with every visitor its virtual space could change. Other reason is to acknowledge that, it is precisely by the potential of new combinations of the elements engaged within The Zone, that new contexts and practices may be imagined. The Zone needs to give room for those on the go. It is because of the potential held by those spaces left, the spaces in between places, that orientation can occur.
It is important to emphasise that, despite the stages of the virus named the different sections of the work- available in the folders d, e, f, g, h, and i -, its engagement turned from a metaphor into the constitutive DNA of The Zone. The virus in The Zone went from naming to bounding each one of the 18 elements that can be found within it. The visitor has always the last word in their correlation, and thus, The Zone embodies a complex space that although running the risk of turning illegible, may be a place from where to imagine new ways of orientation. After all, the collapsing of the organism is always a possibility in the battle against any virus.
Welcome to the zone:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1r-BuemxmrNgXeC7Fo6OrPMuHJ46jlwPe?usp=sharing
