martin bonadeo | texts | locked up landscapes

Martin Bonadeo´s work takes us into the immaterial and luminous space of memory. Just like a contemporary Proust, today the artist´s Madelaine is a projector which makes memories sprout from the peeled off walls of his paternal house. Locked up in this dark biographic space, walls, furniture and domestic devices gain life.

Ghostly and delicate images grow in this house. Dawn at the seaside can sprout out of the bathtub water or a strange lighthouse guides boats as from the bedside lamp.

Magic light effects and supernaturalism present themselves in this daily space in an attempt to equal Lumiére, and while images inhabit objects, memory acquires life beyond memory.

locked up landscapes - concept synthesis
by martin bonadeo

As a prototypical tourist, I usually take lots of photos of those magnificent places which I visit during short and ridiculous periods called vacations. What for? In order to remember, to keep something from this experience and to live it once again in urban monotony.

When the idea of survival between 4 walls is starting to suffocate me, I usually escape by hallucinating with open spaces. I let myself get carried away, using a bit of imagination to remember those moments, decorating my department´s most depressing corners with projections of those "happy" moments gone by.

A projection of photographically registered moments like sunset, sky, clouds, wide landscapes, its vanishing points and limits can dart off sensations which go beyond visual images. In this way both the two dimensional projected visual image and the three-dimensional multi-sensorial space chosen for the projection are being pointed out in a different manner.

Interweaved figure and background disarrange the sense in which we most believe, this makes me doubt about what is being presented, what is being represented, about space and even time. The projector starts to illuminate a spot in order to transform its meaning as well as the projected image´s meaning and this moment produces a break in time and space which brings memory experience close.

I made these transitory installations in different spots of my department where I have been living since birth but I want to leave the place during the next year. First I started to install the works only for me, a kind of mourning. I am the only one who perceived them with all 5 senses, since each situation has tactile, olfactory and gustatory aspects apart from light and sound. In 2000 I decided to reproduce visual and auditory parts of those moments as art works in order to share what I felt in those moments with others. A moment is projected in another moment and then taken into a third moment of representations which are being brought into a room to be exhibited.

This way either of the moments (1) multi-sensorial presentation (installations) or (2) representation (photo/video) acts as art work, the two last mentioned ones are limited by technical aspects regarding vision and hearing. An instant of what happened in that moment can be represented by photography, such as video helps to represent a visual-auditory-temporal sequence. Photographic register in slides is my favorite exhibition form because light passing through the work in darkness causes a sensation which is pretty close to the installation moment. Representation in a dark room with video (including audio) helps, too. If the work is being copied on photographic paper it produces the desired effect, too, but at a smaller grade.

The decision to use low-tech representations in a hi-tech world is related to the before mentioned experience of memory because in my opinion technical quality is not the most important thing, what really matters is what is being called up by the work.

The work is divided in 5 concept settings:

A- Limits of the urban eye: limitless appearances

Just like the other four settings, the first concept is a game. Maybe it has to do with eye rebirth. It is neither more nor less than the idea of horizon, deepness and perspective applied to the corners and hallways of my department.

These works are mentioned in the first place because things simply have to have a presentation order - this principle seems theoretically obvious but it turns out to be quite chaotic during the creative act-. This is therefore the start box in order to understand the game presented by the whole project "Locked up landscapes".

B- Ceiling: The roof as sky of the locked up condition

In the first concept we talked about the difficulty of establishing order, therefore the reason to continue with "ceilings" might be by chance or not. Everything has a reason and I think that the ceiling of a first-floor department in a high building plays a very important role in the development of this work. Lying down in my bed or on the floor and looking upwards, I usually imagine that behind ten more ceilings finally comes the sky and then behind a thick layer of smog, finally the moon, sun, clouds or birds gliding on thermal waves in this burning city. I can see and smell the bathroom ceiling humidity and I wonder what it is "that kills" (Note of the translator: this refers to a popular saying in Buenos Aires: "humidity kills" with respect to the town´s climatic condition) or that is at least what all the old ladies say that I know. After all, I turn on the shower and it is raining. Hopefully it would be so easy to eliminate those hot January months in Buenos Aires.

C- Fantasies in the bathroom: New use of sanitary installations

A bathroom without windows is a paradise of smell and therefore memory, impossible to imagine. Excrement smell mixed with deodorant, tooth paste, shower steam, soap, shampoo and other products which exist to cover up what we are and that we are fading away every minute. I am interested in white bathroom neutrality to project strong and colorful images on it, at the most there is some floral decoration on the shower curtain. For many people bathrooms are sacred, I want to play with this intimacy to put there the idea of four adolescent bystanders, something stereotyped like the Iguazu waterfalls on the toilet or sunset above the bath tub "sea". To project water on water and to see how both movements get in contact while the sun is setting and another exhausting working day is over. Will the sun rise again tomorrow? Every day less people seem to ask this obvious question.

D- Kitchen microclimate: modern housewife desires

Common things or places like a washing machine, microwave, refrigerators or a washroom can be found in most city departments. Everything white and spotless. Breathing the steam coming out of the freezer might have reminded me of the Perito Moreno glacier and that was how it started, I saw Miramar beach waves rolling about in the washing machine, the Sahara and its radiation in the microwave, the fantastic view from the Empire State in my deep washing sink and North American buildings on neat unglued tiles.

E- Observing details: What you miss because you do not know how to observe

Once you start to make exercises of remembering while looking at those places, morphological and sensorial associations will elevate to their maximum potential, that is why I think that this last section has no limits. Maybe I stopped doing it when I had finished my mourning about the house, but I do not think that I could ever put a stop to it in a simple way. I believe that every time that I will be walking through a closed space, traveling in a car or making an exhibition, I will find a corner to seclude myself, to project myself in order to create memory, a transformation of time and space that carries me away if possible - this means: if I have a camera at hand to register what I might be feeling in that space, so that I can share it with others by means of what has been called art through many centuries.

Buenos Aires, May 2001

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