Distance within space

Distance within Space (2023) is a magic lantern show in which a light is shone through a standing brass cutout to cast a shadow projection of Shanghai onto the wall. Yet closer inspection reveals that while the brass panel describes the city’s street map, its shadow depicts Shanghai’s lakes and rivers: these representations of the city are closely related but not the same. The work returns to the origins of cinema to reflect on how our images of the built and natural environment are constructed.

Highlighting the difference between the sign and what is signified, Camargo’s soft and shifting maps illuminate the extent to which cartography is an act of translation that shapes our understanding of the world in which we live. [1]

DISTANCE WITHIN SPACE 
Installation with brass cut-outs, wooden structure and light projection 
2023

The 14th Shanghai Biennale is divided into 9 parts (or 9 palaces), all conceived as developments or deepenings of the Cosmos Cinema theme. The artworks Distance within Space and Soft-map (fractions of space) are exhibited in the section called Of time and space, in which representations of space and time are re-imagined through the work of 6 artists.

Space is socially produced, experimented, and understood. Our maps express ideological, philosophical, and psychological prejudices. The view from above of territorial maps assumes a godlike and timeless perspective. But concepts of above and below are meaningless in mapping the cosmos, where the time is inseparable from space. (…)

As there are as many night skies as positions from which the stars can be observed, so a number of the works here propose alternatives to the colonial logical of cartography as an instrument of domination. Recognizing that every map is conditioned by the space and time of its creation, they offer capacious, flexible, and contingent alternatives. (…)   [2]

14th Shanghai Biennale

Chief curator: Anton Vidokle

Curators: Xiang Zairong, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis

Publications Editor: Ben Eastham

Power Station of Art, Xangai (China)

From November 9, 2023 until March 31, 2024

[1] Text by Ben Eastham for the exhibition catalog.

[2] Excerpt from the introductory exhibition text.