VIAE FERRAE[i]
artists: Malina Ionescu & Andreea Medar
The environment constructed by Mălina Ionescu & Andreea Medar from overlaying and combined fragments of maps brings together images of roads, parts of cities or villages, houses and buildings from various places and time sequences, to become finally one merged map of a place which is emotional, affective and very personal. The space of memory – individual or common – is made of combined images of other places, different in relevance and therefore scale. The spatial identity of a place is – always – defined by more than the geographic reality it corresponds to – or used to. The two artists bring together, on the common, unifying background of the earth and growing wheat, the essentialized images of places relevant to them: their current and former homes, the places of their daily activities, places that belong to their past or only seem to be part of a different time as they either exist no longer or have become inaccessible, places that seem either further away or nearer – their difference in scale is one of the intentional inexactitudes in the otherwise precise maps. Space is compressed or expanded and alters the size, visual expression and direction – intention even – of its elements, which gain a certain unexpected independence: the exhibition contains the image of an unfamiliar place, strange to both the authors, its presence explained by an error in the Google Maps search. This occurrence gives the key to the title, inspired by the wild streets – viae ferrae – from the novella Reports of Certain events in London (in Looking for Jake, Del Ray Books, 2005) by China Miéville. The two artists bring into the project their own images and experiences, just as each of the places comes with its own history, meaning and symbolic charge, in a dialogue that shares and reveals, like any discourse about friendship, coincidences, convergences, differences and situations that complete and enhance each other.
[i] A bow to China Miéville
"Using maps downloaded from Google Maps, Mălina and Andreea created in the exhibition space imaginary trajectories with cut-outs of familiar and profoundly meaningful places that still exist or have disappeared. The result is a white meta-map, onto which the visitors could walk, around the spaces from in between the streets, which have been filled with layers of earth with planted wheat. For the two artists, mapping the personal spaces is an identitary process that determines the dialectical disposition of places of interest, aimed at generating a critical reading.
The key element of the installation has been a video that seemed to present, in real time, images from the exhibition. In fact the footage, filmed the previous evening, captured nine people interpreting the role of curious visitors. With this new level of subjectivation, the installation has a double meaning – it is on the one side an expression of the common interests of the two artists, and the décor of a visual demonstration, on the other."(Anca Mihuleț)
https://revistaarta.ro/en/the-geopoetics-of-feral-streets/
