Artist’s Statement:
Along the frontier territory of Almeria, south-east Spain, the desert landscape is being rapidly transformed by intensive agricultural development, golf courses and hotel complexes.
Increasingly visible in the Almerian landscape is plastic, innovatively used and reused. In the wilderness beyond the synthetic architectural fortresses of industry and leisure lie the improvised dwellings of African migrant workers, made from salvaged plastic. In Badlands (2008-2011) Corinne Silva uses plastic to examine the authentic and artificial, and to explore how ideologies and fantasies are projected onto this desert landscape, which is being dramatically shaped by the connected forces of economic and lifestyle migration.
This work forms part of a long-term, ambitious project to investigate the desert landscapes that lie on the ‘political equator’. Based on a revised geography of the post-9/11 world, a straight line drawn from left to right across a world map intersects at three highly contested territories: the Mexico / USA frontier; southern Spain and northern Africa; and Israel / Palestine. Along these desert borderlands the global south and the global north intersect and overlap. This concept of the new political equator is a destabilisation of historical ways of mapping and colonizing: it suggests a different politics of space.
These desert spaces have all been imagined and created through a prism of the enduring Judeo-Christian myth of the American West and the Promised Land.
Through her work Silva investigates how these landscapes interconnect and overlap, not only politically but also symbolically. Her ongoing series explore how yearning and desire, power and colonization can be made visible through the construction of landscape, and how one landscape can be allied with another.
Biography:
Artist Corinne Silva lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions and commissions include Imported Landscapes, a site-specific installation for Manifesta 8 Paralelos, (2010) and moving image installation Wandering Abroad, from Leeds Art Gallery, UK (2009). Silva won the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Awards in 2010 and 2011 and has been nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award 2012. Forthcoming exhibitions include Flash Forward Festival Boston, Fairmont Battery Wharf, June 7 -10, 2012.
