Atlas
2013
transport of goods back and forth across the border, smug-gling between the two sides, which unilaterally converts them into human merchandise, representing one of the last eche-lons in the social labour structure of globalization. The search for livelihood calls on them to carry, for a few euros, bales of fifty to eighty kilograms on their backs, a daily transfer or
‘atypical trade’ that moves a lot of money on both sides of the border and produces substantial economic profits for a deter-mined elite. For these women porters, as for many others on the planet, norms and controls acquire a secondary value when what really matters is survival. Their life and work situations are conditioned by both local and global interests that are be-yond their power.
Smuggling as it has been throughout history and is now in many places, is their economic source of subsistence given their impoverished situation and relative exclusion. The border is their area of resistance, where a system of life blooms that con-structs another ‘globalization’ from below, where links are es-tablished between work, inequality of gender, migrations, submerged economy etc. This system generates local circuits connected to the global economy that operate outside of it. The sociologist Saskia Sassen would include this within the “coun-ter-geography of globalization”, where women are underpaid, used as a labour force and their rights are not recognized.
This border that joins and divides two continents, is a space of separation that refuses and violates the human rights of many people and forces them into situations of neo slavery.
This paradigm of division and approximation is reinforced every day by the penance or penalty that imposes an unjust system of work, trade and exploitation. We should not forget that borders represent a place of traffic, a changeable, flexible, permeable body that metamorphoses its form through the legal or illegal smuggling of people, goods and merchandise.
In many cases, they are containers of human suffering that, like a container of goods, base its nature on a dichotomy, one of
‘containment’ and at the same time paradoxically of mobility.
In these borders of inequalities, the gap between North and South is probably more evident than others, since these two enclaves belong geographically to the South, but econom-ically to the North. This is where Africa and Europe stand, op-ulence and impoverishment, which gives place to a peculiar socioeconomic reality of interdependences. The social divi-sion is latent. Women porters with their vulnerability have to compete against one another. The economic and social differ-ences of the planet are compressed in the proximities of the border or “border areas” and in the few square kilometres of these two cities.
The ‘smuggler women’ symbolize a tragic existence be-tween suffering and force in view of a charge that is too heavy,
imposed by a power superior to them, just like the titan Atlas from Greek mythology. Resigned, these women assume their role in the global economy, where the avalanche of informa-tion, products or merchandise is infinite; they not only live on the expansion and liberalization of markets, but are also the cheap labour force exploited as the most weak, due to their need for subsistence.
The porters in the series of the installation Atlas appear in a neutralized space, a black background that de-contextu-alises their daily environment, in order to isolate, catalogue, enumerate and document them, with the idea of bringing out their individuality as people. Their activity does not stop being a human gesture that is repeated in time, an oppressing charge bound to poverty, one that we have found in images through-out the history of the art, society, culture and humanity. It is an allegorical, punitive and ‘superhuman’ gesture, that in the digital era survives as an icon and that Aby Warburg, in the early twentieth century, includes in his Atlas Mnemosyne, an image file that was a machine activating ideas, relationships and thoughts, exploring the relationship between language and image.
The project Atlas tries to be a mechanism of correspon-dences in the same way, an almanac of images, where the re-lations between the conceptual, the document and the digital construction serve to question the limits of visual representa-tion associated with the idea of reality, without forgetting that the vision of the foreign thing, the different, the other one be-longs to a series of narratives and dominant global processes.
The allegorical value of Atlas, its visual similarity or prox-imity to the mythological figure, not only refers to the women porters of the border, but also to many other individuals or social groups that like them resist and carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. In the world of mobility, these stories are devoured by history, and this forms a new “human map-ping process”, which moves away from the simple represen-tation of a map, as it can not be determined by a few two-dimen-sional lines. These micro histories are included in the project, which uses a hybrid proposal where different audio-visual medias coexist, such as photography, video and installation.
The project Atlas constitutes a work in progress, an expan-dable, transnational and open work of art. Beyond being con-sidered a critical process only, it wants to invite the spectator to reflect on his/her position, because globalization defines us all as potential interdependent or ‘consuming’ actors.
[42] Victor López González: Atlas, installation detail, 2013.
The work The Smuggler of Images (2012) is based on the idea of deconstruction and questions the concepts of borders and frontiers using the figure of a smuggler as a person who exceeds these limits, in effect ignoring them.
The video work uses a labyrinthine narrative strategy with various levels of ‘reality’ to create a common space in time be-tween two figures. The protagonist Antonio Giavelli, a former smuggler, talks about his problems and experiences smug-gling between Italy and France in the Stura Valley. In the tem-poral space of the video he encounters a fictitious contempo-rary smuggler who tries, with the help of donkeys, to trans-gress the boundary, carrying ‘illegal goods’ in the form of an indefinite number of images.
In the video installation images from different geograph-ical areas of the Stura Valley converge with shots of high-tech industries located there, which suggests a common cartogra-phy for both protagonists as well as a way of thinking about history.
[43] Victor López González: The Smuggler of Images, video still, 2012.