VIVIANA GONZÁLEZ MENDEZ, Columbia – Switzerland
media artist
www.cargocollective.com/vivianagonzalezm
is a Colombian visual artist and a PhD candidate at ZhdK with Profs. Giaco Schiesser and Ricardo Toledo. Her artistic/research work explores mediums including installation and drawing.
In her artistic practices, she has been seeking to understand from what construction (cultural, philosophical, conceptual) others and herself structure our idea of what space is. This questioning arises mainly from the difference she has always found between my own experience - and from others close to me - of places, and the hegemonic ways of making images of spaces. And because of this difference, she asks herself what other constructions, what other non-hegemonic concepts of space exist and how it is possible to make an artistic investigation from them.
Currently, she focuses on issues such as relationships we establish with our surroundings, and she wonders about the possibility of understanding space from non-western perspectives. How could images related to places be, if we take as paradigms, non-hegemonic ways of thinking and relating to spaces?
As a PhD candidate and from her previous experience in teaching arts in Colombia, she believes that knowledge is produced through dialogue, interaction, and collective construction.
CREDITS AND REFERENCES
1. Photo credit: Ariane Trümper
1. www.ceciliavicuna.com
2. Marisol de la Cadena (2015). Earth Beings. Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press
3. David Woodward et. al (1998) The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies. David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis (eds.) vol.2, Book 3. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press
4. Milton Santos (2000) La naturaleza del espacio : técnica y tiempo, razón y emoción. Barcelona : Editorial Ariel, 2000
5. Edward W. Soja (2009) Taking space personally. in: The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Barney Warf and Santa Arias (eds.) London & New York: Routledge