New Works: Meta-Geographies



petroleum lines, 2008, archival inkjet print on paper, 110 x 200cm



petroleum lines, (detail) 2008, archival inkjet print on paper, 110 x 200cm


america is from mars and europe is from venus(2008) archival inkjet print on paper, each 170 x 110cm



america is from mars (detail), 2008, archival inkjet print on paper, 170 x 100 cm

Meta-Geographies, combines a variety of satellite images with text and other information taken from the Internet.

petroleum lines (2008) combines satellite imagery of the main Saudi Arabian oil terminal, Ras Tanura with images of Toyota, Japan; Wolfsburg, Germany; and Flint, Michigan (the headquarters of General Motors). The combined geographical image shows parts of the various motor cities partially submerged in the waters of the Persian gulf.

Source code, algorithms and charts overlay the whole picture and refer to scientific measurments of water temperature, ice melt and the effect of fire on climate change.

The series uses metaphor and metonymy to map the structures of geo-political relations and connections in the ever shrinking space of the globalized 21st Century.

America is from mars and europe is from venus (both 2008), refer to an phrase coined by the American neo-conservative Robert Kagan after the 2004 Madrid bombings. The works not only literalise Kagan’s word, placing an aerial view of the Pentagon on NASA photos of the Martian surface, and views of the European Commission and European Parliament on Venus, but also add additional layers of information in the form of source code excerpts, as well as art historical and symbolic meaning.

El-Andalus clips (2008)
is made up of five short clips, each under two minutes. The clips exist as stand alone works, or together. Three (no. 1,3 and 5) include recitations of a text collage derived from internet blogs written by migrants from the Near East ,living in Europe or North America. The narrator, uneasy in her use of English stumbles across the text. Combinations of takes and breakdowns are used as an editing device for the visual images, collected excerpts of footage from southern Spain - the ruins of a Moorish fort, the view across the straits of Gibraltar, architectural details from Alhambra - which refer to Europe's old cultural connection to the Near East. Image and text, unrelated in origin, combine and influence each others form to elicit new meanings and relations.




The soundtrack of El Andalus clip #2 (breath) is made up of the narrator's breaths, gasps and laughs between words. It forms a first intermezzo, when viewed with the other four clips




El Andalus #4 (fate) was filmed on a hillside on the SE Spanish coast. The soundtrack is one word (Inshallah) stretched out over the duration of the clip, which forms the second intermezzo, when all five clips are viewed together.