IVAN CORTAZAR
SIN TIEMPO <--Click to go to the gallery’s website
“Sin tiempo” is a photographic diary. Using a pinhole camera and long time exposures I try to merge events into one single image. The film is exposed during my breakfast, shower, diner or a subway ride. The camera follows me in my daily life becoming a selective “Big brother” that returns images of my existence.
EVIDENCIAS <-- Click to go to the gallery’s website
“Looking for evidence” is a documentary project about the 2nd American war against Iraq. As an alien in the USA, I wanted to document the streets of NYC during the war. I don’t have any relatives in either the US or Iraq. I don’t know any person fighting in that country nor any person directly involved in that conflict. When the war started I was a complete outsider living in a country at war. From that perspective, I tried to find the evidence of that war in the streets of NYC. For me, the city seemed to be the same and only few demonstrations, policemen in the subway and the constant 24-hour news broadcast made me feel that something was not “normal”. I kept living the same life; went to the movies, had dinner with friends and if I didn’t turn on the TV at night or buy the news, everything would be the same as before the war started.
I realized that basically, the signs of that war on the streets of NYC were newspapers spread through out the city massively. I could see people everywhere buying the news, reading them and soon afterwards, throwing them. All the garbage cans and sidewalks in the city were filled up with text and images that were telling a distant story. I wandered the streets of NY searching though the trash for evidence of a war I couldn’t and didn’t want to see with my bear eyes.
I felt so attracted to the fact that image and text were randomly mixed with the trash making natural collages. I say natural because only chance played in their creation, giving those collages a Dadaist flavor but without a Dada artist behind. Bullets were placed next to banana peels and popular culture debris were mixed up with an image of a chemical mask. The garbage cans were silent witnesses of what was happening, digesting everything and waiting the next day to get more. The garbage cans didn’t care about the tragedy of the conflict. They didn’t care about the dead people or the politicians’ words; they just played a foolish game making their own non-sense statements.
Just few weeks after the war started, it became harder and harder to find those signs of war on the streets of New York.
TRASH Installation.
Photography - Video projection - TV - Sound
An animation of a NY garbage can, that rotates and throws back to the street the news papers and garbage that contains.
DIALOGOS Installation.
Photography - Video
Work in progress where I place photographs and videos next to each so they can “speak” to each other.
