ABSENCE
OF PLACE
by
Xavier Cortada
Installation at
OMNIART Miami
December 3 -6, 2005
(during Art Basel Miami Beach)
Xavier Cortada
Absence of Place, 2005
Medium:
Absentees:
180 photographs of “absent” Miami (inside plastic bags)
clipped on to a wall of a building soon to be demolished
(site of OMNIART 3).
Residue:
primer, cinder blocks and mangrove plants on a floor where
a mangrove forest once grew.
Urban
renewal:
224 mangrove seedlings (in water-filled plastic cups)
lined along a plane where a new development will soon be
erected.
In a few years, I will sit
in this very spot, sip on a Martini before ordering my
steak, and wonder, “Is this where I installed Absence
of Place?”
Statement:
Miami artist Xavier Cortada sees the past
in every concrete-and-steel vision of the future. As an
unprecedented building boom continues to remake his city,
he walks familiar paths and increasingly is left with the
sense of being lost.
As landmarks vanish and slick new buildings
loom, Cortada focuses on what used to be.
"When you walk by a new building today you
can't imagine that in 1914 there was a wooden shack there.
And much less, that 20 years before there was a mangrove
forest. We get stuck in visual constructions. We are so
focused on the here and now and what looks to be concrete
that we forget that history makes the concrete fluid.''
Through his art, he attempts to reclaim
Florida's fertile past. The concrete columns that hold up
I-95 through downtown Miami now bear Cortada's mark: in
2004, he painted colorful mangrove seedlings on columns
across four neighborhoods, a metaphoric re-foresting and
an invitation to locals to celebrate the cultural riches
that made Miami.
"I hope my art helps people think about
what was here before, what immigrant groups came here,
what kinds of struggles the people had to go through to
get us to where we are. Context is what allows us to go
forward in a sensitive and proactive way. To grow and to
not take a look back is what is problematic.''
He has elaborated on the mangrove metaphor
in murals he created for Miami City Hall, the Miami-Dade
County Commission Chambers, the Florida Capitol, and the
Museum of Florida History.
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