Filipe Afonso / THE MASTER AND THE SLAVE / exhibition within the artist residence
Filipe Afonso
THE MASTER AND THE SLAVE
exhibition within the artist residence
opening
29.11.2017 / 5 p.m.
Centre for Creative Activities / ul. Gen. Zaruskiego 1a /Ustka
Video projection
MATERIAL HISTORY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
29.11 – 06.12.2017
Centre for Creative Activities / ul. Gen. Zaruskiego 1a /Ustka
/ conference room/ I floor / free entrance
Installation and video projection
THE MASTER AND THE SLAVE
29.11 – 06.12.2017
available to visitors on:
Monday, Friday / 8 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Wednesday / 8 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Tuesday, Thursdayw / 8 a.m. – 8 p.m.
Baltic Cultural Center in Ustka / ul. Kosynierów 21 / I floor / free entrance
THE MASTER AND THE SLAVE is a video-installation set in a distant future in which humans live in Mars and wish to return back on Earth. Many experiments tried but failed to allow humans to live permanently on Earth. And when that time comes not everyone will be allowed to enter Earth. At that time it was difficult to tell what was natural and artificial, what was original and what was fake, which things were biological and which were inorganic or synthetic, including humans. Simone was one of them. From human to android, from bankrobot to dogrobot, from fortune teller machine to arm vending machine, from smart aubergine to chatbot. THE MASTER AND THE SLAVE is a story sedimented in a long tradition omnipresent in the public imagination about technology mastering humans rather than serving them. It is about the fear of technology, fear of what is strange, fear of the other one, Fear of what moves… Fascination gives place to rejection. Technology from time to time experienced many sidebacks. Like Humanity. After this one had acquired an high standard of human development, justice and equality for all human beings, it still needed slaves.
Place: Baltic Cultural Center in Ustka / ul. Kosynierów 21 / I floor
MATERIAL HISTORY IN THE DIGITAL AGE / Centre for Creative Activities /ul. Gen. Zaruskiego 1a
2012 / ENCURRALADA NOS ROCHEDOS REPUBLIKA CZESKA / PORTUGALIA, 13:00 MIN
2015 / BLUE MOSQUE CEILING / TURCJA /PORTUGALIA / 09:33 MIN
2016 / A PARADOXICAL HYPERTROPHY OF TOUCH / PORTUGALIA/FRANCJA / 12:00 MIN
2017 / ARTIFACT AS REFUGEE / FRANCE /PORTUGAL / 24:00 MIN
ENCURRALADA NOS ROCHEDOS, 2012, CZECH REPUBLIC/PORTUGAL, 13:00
Anna is visiting a foreign city. She goes through many places and always finds the same two girls. They never speak, although it seems obvious that they should. Encurralada nos Rochedos (Confined in the Rocks) is an expression from Peter Sloterdijk and here Anna is, perhaps delicately, exposed to the violence and anxiety of traveling. As she sees the world through the camera, she realizes what she’s been going through: she doesn’t see with her own eyes, she doesn’t speak, she’s not living… Anna walks, walks a lot, but she realizes she is not going too far, she’s not moving.
BLUE MOSQUE CEILING, 2015, TURKEY/PORTUGAL, 09:33
The Bible, Book of Job 7:8 “The eye of him that hath seene me, shall see mee no more: thine eyes are vpon me, and I am not.” – King James Version (1611) “The eye of him who sees me will behold me no longer; Your eyes {will be} on me, but I will not be”. – New American Standard Version (1995). This work looks into how we approach the divine either through meditation or through a digital connection. There are many ways to see a Ceiling (100 ways are shown here) as there are many ways to see the invisible things. This invisible thing refers not only to the divine but also to societal relations and divisions. Here different ways of seeing, (be)living and represent a space are exposed, revealing their seemingly peaceful barriers: pray on one side, contemplation and leisure on the other; women and tourists in one hand, (Muslim) men on the other. This also leads to the collision of two mental spaces – the meditative and the digital – and of their practices – the pray and the documentation of the pray – showing that different ways of connecting to the divine may be possible.
A PARADOXICAL HYPERTROPHY OF TOUCH, 2016, PORTUGAL/FRANCE, 12:00
A PARADOXICAL HYPERTROPHY OF TOUCH explores our physical relation with art and the instruments that mediate our perception. According to Boris Groys, the museum is a machine of immortality, of making things, objects, artifacts last forever. But that technology should also be extended to humans to make them also live forever and allow them to know the universe in a more expanded time. This project aims to show that while one anxiety decreases (that one allowed by immortality) the other one increases (the one that museums create by multiplying artifacts and by changing the order and placement of history). The museum is mapped here as a cosmos: with stars, comets, galaxies, satellite planets and black holes. Museums turn into spaces for artificial intelligence. Curators care for artworks. Machines care for humans. Anti-aging techniques feed vampires. A pilgrimage to the sun turns into a total eclipse.
ARTIFACT AS REFUGEE, 2017, FRANCE/PORTUGAL, 24:00
Artifact as refugee invites us to reflect on the way in which cultural property testifies to conflicts and conveys the stakes of power that are linked to them. In a tension between conservation and destruction, pillage and repatriation, imperialism and nationalism, original and digital copy, the project explores the paradoxical role of artifacts in a struggle between objects and human beings.
MATERIAL HISTORY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Centre for Creative Activities / ul. Gen. Zaruskiego 1a / Ustka
Filipe Afonso’s late work revolves around the museum and its archives. Through virtual interfaces, he represents voyages and pilgrimages to contemporary sites that serve as spiritual, tourist, and religious destinations. His work explores the place of material history in the digital age and questions what kinds of individual, personal, and popular memory can be found in institutions and their objects seemingly removed from the present. At the same time, he addresses the endlessly manipulable qualities of the digital and takes as a point of departure the digital as a fiction, as a sign that the age of the document is over. Through working with the digital remnants of media as an archaeologist would the site of an ancient temple, to reproduce reality as the fiction out of which it initially came, to help us see the contemporary history, ie. the ongoing narration, that surrounds us, and the unexpected and intimate ways that we are connected through world historical sites and artifacts, even as globalization would flatten these sites of their haptic and affective resonances.
The museum and the museological practices became the subject of his last works. It appears as one of the most importante institutions of the XXI century where the museological practices and uses are not limited to the traditional museum but are also present, among others, in churches, banques, freeports or our own homes.
We face a world full of museums, art objects, documents and monuments. Mediation and representation are stronger than experience. Despite the ease of travel, it becomes increasingly difficult to know all places and museums of the world, once they multiply physically and digitally, thereby generating some anxiety in a post-capitalist world where offer and access do not realy coincide.
Filipe Afonso’s work explores different modes of mediation (technology, media, art, tourism, religion, politics and economy) between humans and what they see, hear, think and feel. Influenced by the way human beings interact with technology and how our access to images is being transformed, his work, even if it sometimes can be focused on a character, speaks of global and universal meanings for contemporary anxieties produced in these forms of mediation.
Filipe Afonso lives between France and Portugal and studied Cinema in Lisbon and Prague. He has shown his work, curated or collaborated – among others – with the Harvard Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives, Microscope Gallery, Kassel Dokfest, the Portuguese and Tel Aviv Cinematheques, Indielisboa, Artists Television Access, Platoon Kunsthalle, Collectif Jeune Cinema, Cinema du Reel, Centre Pompidou, Gaite Lyrique, Pleasure Dome and MIX NYC.