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ZOO-GRAPHIES
On reading the subject of the symposium some things came to my mind: the rapid spread of global surveillance, the obsession with security, oppressions, the social compliance with the fact of being monitored. How we become a statistic, a consumer, how we are guided towards consumerism from birth to death, what happens to our personal information, and where it is going.
This the time of the Panopticon. There's nowhere to hide. We are observers and observed. We become tagged and we tag the world around us. But in this panopticon we are all watchers as well as prisoners, with the possibility to transcend the physical world to enlarge our views virtually looking at the farthest points of the globe. Identities are lost, dissolved in an infinite network of data, lost among the flow of information and in the multiplication of observation points.So we hide in the hive. No rules just a continuous jump in between landmarks.
Most of my work is a direct development from this relationship between the observer and being the object of observation. This can be seen in some of the recurrent subjects in my artistic practice: the search for the insignificant, forgotten things or sometimes things invisible at first sight, the mixture of elements of personal and collective memory, I'm also interested in observing the subtle changes in the environment and intrigued by emotional responses to a sense of place.
Given the interconnected nature of this age of information technology, where knowledge is both currently available and in continuous flux, the artist could enter the scene as an information traveller, loaded down with all kinds of collected data regarding landmarks, places of historical interest, the best restaurants, etc etc; or as "the other", as tourist, in constant expectation of encountering the truth of the local in the illusion of the stereotype; both fall prey to the simulation.

I am interested in approaching the village and its people, taking a step away from the kind of frame that information technology imposes upon any locality in the world. It is my intention to arrive with only the barest minimum of knowledge or preconceptions regarding the area, and to make discoveries through field exploration, with the collaboration of local volunteers, in the plotting of experience maps of the village, drawing upon their own personal landmarks, exploring the emotional contours of the community and its surroundings, and charting a series of significance trails, capturing and channelling a diversity of patterns, behaviours, identities and signals.
For this purpose, I intend to invite different groups within the community eg children, the elderly, and colleagues within the symposium, to "wander" around and to point out different layers of human landmarks, indicating locations related with their own personal experience. The trails may evolve greatly and may also strike out in unexpected directions.

I will promote the walks in a very simple way, using hand made posters, contacting local people directly and inviting them to go around in a discovery trail. There will be no preconceived or scheduled end to the walks; they may just as easily end in someone's house for a communal dinner, as they might distintegrate halfway through.
Walks will be recorded using video, photography and sound recording devices, as well as collection of objets trouvees to incorporate with a personal travelogue and to create as a memory artifact, that will be expressed through a website. The maps created through these explorations will be drawn in collaboration with the participants, and once again expressed through the website.