About the iDisplacements Project
Incidents of iMirror-iTravel at the 2017 Venice Biennale
Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
This Medium publication is only one facet of a project that includes site-specific intervention, photo documentation, and textual reflection. It plays out in the favours asked and the devices begrudgingly contributed; in the participant’s resulting phantom ache; in the slowed pace and secondary documentation of passersby; on Instagram and Medium; between immediate metaphors of ‘art as mirror’ and ‘black mirrors’ and Venice as a mirror; between reflection and refraction and smudging and buzzing; between stasis and anticipation; between glass and gravel; across sites displaced.
It takes as a rubric Robert Smithson’s 1969 essay “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” published in Artforum in September of that year, and the nine corresponding photographs that accompanied the text and documented the moments of literal reflection (“Displacements #1 – #9”).
Fifty years later, the ink black of the ever-ready pocket mirrors of today displace not the “jungles and wastelands” of the Yucatan—a site sought out for its elusive ‘wilderness’—but instead the Venice Biennale, a site built to showcase fine art as the epitome of ‘civilisation’.
Mirrors exchanged for phones, the Yucatan for the Venice Biennale. iMirrors, iTravel, iDisplacements.
To displace is alchemical — a non-retractable transmutation.
To displace is violent.
To displace is symbolic.
To displace is rhetoric.
*is is at once can be and or not.
This project was made possible by a grant from the British Council and the Royal College of Art.
