In late 2019, Sarah Duffy was an artist-in-residence at lugar a dudas. Meanwhile, artist and lugar a dudas residency manager, Ivan Tovar was over 4000 miles away on residency with Raw Material Company in Dakar, Senegal. In Sarah’s final week, Ivan returned to Cali and, although their meeting was brief, the conversations they had made a strong impression on both artists.
A year later, Ivan invited Sarah to participate in a commission for Triangle: Artist Encounters. A series of exchanges followed around the problematics of landscape representation and the dangers of replicating dominant imperialist narratives in an international artist-in-residency context. One such area of discussion was around the evolution of military technology, such as GPS and drones, into commercial products that supposedly offer objective representations of space. In a time when we’re increasingly consuming images of our world virtually, It seems ever more important that we remain critical of technologies of representation. How, for example, might the gaze of these technologies petrify and nullify living breathing space, turning it into nothing more than a simulacra?
For ‘Vantage Points’ Ivan and Sarah have extended this conversation into a two-part video essay in which they combine footage taken from each other's residencies abroad - including Sarah’s 2018 residency in South Korea - with found footage that utilises multiple forms of representation. The result is a complex comment on virtuality, distance and landscape representation as propaganda.