Fake plastic forevers & detournement of digital colonialism • Internet Moon Gallery • Online • 2018
Group Show
Fake plastic forevers, curated by Juan Covelli, is a new reiteration of his previous internet-based work Speculating the Fragmented Copyy, created for the web residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM | Center for Art and Media, where he released 14 high-definition 3D scans from Mesoamerican archaeological artifacts that he scanned from the Stavenhagen Collection -CCU Tlatelolco in Mexico.
Covelli has commissioned 6 artists to revisit his digital archive to create new work using the 3D models, to give the 2,000-year-old archaeological treasures a new digital life. The 3D scans presented are freed from physical matter, an illusion of sorts. Translated to a new dimension and language, which is not made of tangible material, their components are zeroes and ones, without dimension. The new artifacts are algorithmic calculations, released from the museum and its geographical limitations; now they are coming back to the people. Not bound by the original, the digitalized objects can become forever multiple, forever fluid. The project is part of a current open source countermovement against museums and tech companies such as Google who are also digitizing cultural heritage for creative re-use, but often just reproduce tactics of traditional colonialism due to closed and controlled production environments.
The works here presented are posing difficult questions about archiving, ownership, and the bias of interpretation in the digital world. What happens as we increasingly digitize our physical life; how is culture and ownership present in this malaise? The new video piece ‘Shipment Lost at Sea’ by Leá Porré is a hyperreal narrative where the artifacts are lost at sea during their colonial journey to the West. It portrays an exhibition that will never open and aims to highlight this process of decontextualisation as a profoundly violent one, a brutal shipwreck. It echoes the slave-trading practice of throwing slaves overboard into deep sea, from which ensued a myth that seas were haunted by floating remnants of survivors. The video displays this fragmented sunken history, where the artefacts form an alternative reality of surviving in a borderless space, never reaching their destination nor returning to their point of origin.
With: Juan Covelli - Léa Porré - Olga Mikh Federova - Miguel Ángel Salazar - Neale Willis - Yuma burgess - Nabbterri
Work commissioned:
• Shipment Lost at Sea (2018)
‘Shipment Lost at Sea’ is a hyperreal narrative of Meso-American artefacts lost at sea during their colonial journey towards the West. It portrays an exhibition that will never open, and aims to highlight this process of decontextualisation as a profoundly violent one, a brutal naufrage.
It echoes the slave-trading practice of throwing slaves overboard into deep sea, from which ensued a myth that seas were haunted by floating remnants of survivors.
The video displays this fragmented sunken history, where the artefacts form an alternative reality of surviving in a borderless space, never reaching their destination nor returning to their point of origin.
