DESCRIPTION

 

This installation was born in a close room of the Museo de la Ciudad (an important cultural precinct located in the city of Querétaro, Mexico). Using video projections as the main component, a series of images and sound atmospheres were recreated to receive one member of the audience at a time and guide him or her trough an intimate journey along a personal and iconic memory. The silhouette of the guest interacted with the video projections.

 

The installation admits only one spectator at a time, because the experience is expected to be as personal and intimate as it could be. Before accessing into the room, each member of the audience must fill a format in which they reveal some memory that can help us to generate the self-portrait. The formats includes specific questions about a beloved object, an unknown place or a special day in which the spectator felt recognized or beloved. After this, the spectator gets into the intervened space, where its image was projected over predetermined images. An improvised story, based on the memory that the spectator shared, must be told at a microphone that disseminates narrator´s soft and close voice throughout the room.     

 

In order to achieve our goal we are using technological tools such as Kinects (tracking sensor and infrared camera). Because we need to recognize the movement pattern as well as the location and the shape of the spectator, this kind of electronic device fits quite well to our conceptual and aesthetical tasks. 

 

The member of the audience never realizes who are operating this immersive illusion because the artists always remain out of site, behind a 3.5 meters tall and 8 wide curve screen. It is vital to maintain the sensation of privacy and intimacy. Although both, the visual artist and the performer, improvises in real time a personalized story for the guest, there are predetermined video projection effects that reacts depending on the spots of the room where the spectators moves trough.

 

Ismael Gimate operates the video projections and, depending on each particular guest, reveal the images and selects the musical environment.

 

Mariana Hartasánchez is in charge of telling improvised new stories that are conceived instantaneously, taking as a starting point the formats that were filled by each member of the audience.  

 

Fernando Flores, a recognized light and set designer, built up the screen in which the images were projected, he also installs for each presentation video and audio system. Lighting is carefully designed in order to receive our guests warmly.  

 

The central concept of this installation remains in generating emotions and thoughts about memory´s vulnerability. What we think is written in stone gets modified depending on the events of our lives. We lose details, amplified sensations, exaggerates passages, visit obsessively some instants. This memory inconsistence, that determines our identity, will be shown in a poetical way. Far away from social media, lives our truthful self.

 

The musical and sound recreations generates evocative environments that must softly guide the spectator´s emotional perception. The images, almost all of them related to open and natural views, are saturated of special details that turns them into magical and oniric places. The interaction with the audience is crucial, lighting, sound transmission and video projections will react spontaneously at movement´s speed and quality. The visual effects, such as particles, coloured silhouettes and blurred shapes, will walk along with the guests.

 

The main objective of this work is to let the audience inhabit literally the art piece. Each spectator can look itself from unexpected angles, because it had a chance to find face by face with itself, without the necessity of communicating his discover with anybody else. For an instant the people who gets inside the room can free themselves from the obsession of being always connected. He or she eludes the idea of exteriorizing each idea that appears into their minds.

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WE ARE OUR GREATEST GHOST

 

We are here, at the present time. Our memories remains in the past. We are what we lived, but we will never be again where we have lived. The time is a ghost that pursues us in too many different ways. Throughout the history, humanity has create a lot of ingenious ways to preserve the past, to let us save the precious moments that easily fades away. But the truth is that, no matter how many photographs, videos, voice records or writings we accumulate, there is something that we can´t never capture about ourselves. There is something that is inevitably hiding from the glance of our eyes, something that is there, like an invisible presence, and walks with us along every path we choose to take. That ghost, which Freud named the unconscious, determined our identity. Sometimes, in dreams, we can see, suddenly and momentarily, those ghosts, but their faces are blurred. The ghosts likes to play tricks and use all kinds of masks. But art let us capture those ghosts inside words, images and sounds. Maybe we will never see again our memories in the precise ways in which they actually happened, but what we can see, touch, feel and listen are those memories transfigured into art. We can feel the ghosts and reconciled with them. Maybe it is impossible to fully understand what they are saying to us, but what we can do is to make them present in our hearts, to give them a place in our soul. Ghosts can be less terrifying if they are enclosure inside an art trap, in a melody, in an image, in a story. We are our greatest ghost.