Coalescence

Coalescence recalls an invitation to create a dialogue in between two different identities. On one hand, the online platform SCANDALE Project, and on the other, the artist run space ULTRASTUDIO. Both curatorial team are invited to select and connect artists for the Re_Act 2018 residency, to curate a two-in one exhibition.

Foreseen as a matrix, the Azores Archipelago tends to the creative and the curatorial emulsion while also, being an artwork itself. Therefore, the wild scenario of the residency is an empowering labora- tory offering a context to artists and curators. This residency stands for the exploration of the artificial and the organic experiences in a dialogue shaping this coalescence.

EVERYBODY WANTS TO FIND A PINK ISLAND

“Everybody wants to find a pink island”(1) embodies our scenario, in the context of the Azores Archipelago which become the scenery, the quest and the search of an inner paradise through the landscape exuberance. The technological environment of today’s era pushes the boundaries and the need for intense experience, where devices and internet blur the possible limits in between reality and virtuality.

We ask, what remains from the landscape experience?

The event is no longer the landscape but its experience. As described by Jean Baudrillard(2) the experience is already transformed into hyperreality, flirting with the simulacrum of concreteness. Hyperreality mixes the real with the imagination, therefore virtuality instantaneously submerges itself into reality. The landscape’s virtual existence becomes part of a key-word browsing history pretending to be authentic. However, the landscape is as real as simulated, irresistibly virtual yet frozen into reality.

In this exhibition, the Azores archipelago embodies the concept of heterotopia defined by Michel Fou- cault(3), a physical space where utopias come to life. This concept layers multiple territories in a lo- calised space which normally wouldn’t co-exist. This otherworldliness, more real, more virtual, core of the experience where the landscape overflows onto the infinite Atlantic. Thus, the scenery invites the contemplation of heterotopia in the age of internet, devices, app and filters directly covering reality. Suddenly virtuality turns reality and heterotopia becomes this other space, dematerialized and paradoxi- cally still anchored in realness.

Each work investigates the experience of the landscape through various approaches. Ewa Doroszenko’s tex- tile work isolates the image, enhancing a digital abstraction. Bahar Yürükolgu contrasts an algorithmic vision of this consumerism era on video; and delivers her printed perception of the landscape by mixing the organic and artificial feeling. João Paulo Serafim dematerializes the natural history’s display as part of his ongoing research. Plasticity function as a research tool aiming to understand and gravitate around the condition of the contemporary human habitat.

- SCANDALE PROJECT