Alejandro Ramirez

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The tension between the living, the dead and the uncanny “other” –the zombie, the undead, the phantom that rises from beneath-- is present in many cultural representations. The Voodoo zombie, the Nuclear War freak, the clone, the android, the corpse that unexplainable emerges from the ground, the parasite, just to name some, represent a set of characters and events that have dominated popular culture and that from their very roots are questioning the understanding of life and death. What makes something alive? Are their memories, their history, their identity or their heartbeat? Is life a cultural or a scientific term? Then, what is to resurrect? How is the notion of life transformed by the possibility of repetition, eco, of the artificial being?

In this context, two notions: “Give Life” and “Resurrect” have an immense historical and connotative load. It is my intention, to address them specifically as artistic mechanisms. Then, to “Give Life” is to register, to document something or someone; is the process of inscribing. In this sense, universes are created while archiving, organizing, choosing, editing and forgetting (what is left out while editing). In the other hand, to “Resurrect” is to bring back to life something that was already here or was forgotten; in this process the object or idea changes in to a certain degree, contamination and transformation are inherent to the act of resurrecting. Therefore, to bring back to life, implies that a different kind of life is inserted in the now empty vessel: a reassignment of meaning. These are the processes that I want to mimic in my project in order to render visible relations that can trigger in the spectator different ways of understanding the discourses that shape the quotidian around us.

 The narratives (the mythologies) that give sense to present and past have been brought to life by several mechanisms, such as documentation, discourse creation, cultural legitimization and representation. In this sense, the concepts of Identity and History should be understood as changing and never static, nor transparent; always adapting and being adapted: part of the flux themselves. As for my research, I wish to deepen into the various relations that are created among the elements of history and identity specifically in the framework of contemporary migrations and economical flows, in other words, to analyze the structures of power, the mythologies created around them and how they shape in an ongoing process the everyday life. More over, I wish to address the question of how migration and flow have derived in specific ways of making sense of the world, of giving life to narrations. 

Technologies, communication, globalization, the market and the constant and increasingly immateriality of the world has obliged to rethink territorial borders and communities that can no longer be solely based on notions such as nationality, language and culture. The illusion of one world, popularize by the development of new technologies is constantly being challenge by the concept of visa-line an IP address.  Then, how to re-think and re-tell narratives and inventions around these issues and their political implications? How this new imaginary stories affect the individual? How can these processes of diegesis be transformed into a visual discourse? From the perspective of the mechanisms formerly described, my research addresses, broadly speaking, the concepts of History and Identity as contrive narratives that, whichever personal or collective, represent a contextual construction that can no longer be thought outside the framework of information, economical fluxes, migration policies and speed... 

[fragment++++++ chasingforghost++] IN PROCESS !!!

www.aramirez.net