Liquid City | 41 Estações
Art Museum of the Americas
Washington DC, 2020
Curated by Fabián Goncalves and Sinara Sandri, the exhibition Liquid City | 41 Estações opened on February 26th 2020 at the Art Museum of the Americas with a reception attended by the Washington DC art and diplomatic communities.
Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic cut the exhibition short.
Fabián contacted me and suggested we put together a more detailed web presence for the exhibition on our respective sites. Anyone who wished to could take a look and see what we were up to and how we got there.
On this web page I focus on Liquid City because I know that Luciano Siqueira — who also exhibited in this show — can provide superior insights into his own work, which you can see here.
Please don’t forget to see the list of thanks and acknowledgements that end this page.
— Frank Rodick, April 2020
On making Liquid City: video slide show with commentary
*Two things about this video. First, I tried to make it personal and not a bore. So there’s more about my feelings, memories, and the story behind Liquid City than there is about the intricacies of, say, selenium toning. (But if you’re keen to hear about my adventures in selenium, talk to me.) Second, I’m no auteur when it comes to video. So, while you’re free to criticize my filmmaking skills as well as my photographs, keep in mind that the former qualify as low hanging fruit. Thanks, FR.
If you want to read a transcript of my commentary in this video, click here.
Pictures from the exhibition at the Museum of the Americas
*Many thanks to Rafa Cruz for making these images and giving permission to post them here.
Exhibition statement by Sinara Sandri
Initially conceived as a refuge and a place for meeting, the city presents the need of mobility and the challenge of the unknown. At the same time desired and feared, the unexpected is a condition that causes discomfort, giving rise to control measures that, in many cases, involve spatial planning as a strategy to stabilize the conditions for the development of human life.
Landscape instability is an urban feature, but the circulation of information and the action of locative media cause an unprecedented imbalance between informational and physical flows. Being mobile and connected is a requirement of the contemporary city, while the spaces for local living are reduced. We live a new experience where we handle the various layers of spaces – simultaneous, immediate and combined events – gathered on our smartphones. A vertigo of shared geographical coordinates and timezones that disembarks in the fragmented time of a city that seems intoxicated by the excess of its own energy.
It is precisely at this moment that AMA brings together two authors of different longitudes and generations who photography the city in a very particular way. While Canadian Frank Rodick breaks the location reference to scour his subjective world, Brazilian Luciano Siqueira makes a taxonomy of beings emerging from the Rio de Janeiro subway underground.
The meeting takes place in a territory of experience where the two authors dismiss the viewer to face their themes and impertinences. They abandon their body and camera to the city movement to construct images from a perception that is not limited to eye sight. The process they use is special in the production of image about cities tradition, marked by a style of seeing and experiencing the environment as an external observer where cities look like an inhospitable scenario of anonymity. Unlike distanced observation, where we have an intellectual effort to understand the world, the images displayed here result from a process of sense activation that take off the centrality of vision in the act of deciding and clicking. Thus, its enjoyment can facilitate a sensory experience where the important thing is not to discover a meaning hidden in the images, but, on the contrary, what they have as untranslatable. By constituting photography as a form of knowledge and an opportunity to face the present, the cities of these authors do not display identity marks, but retain their experience in the electronic metropolis. Places where connectivity and velocity are necessary for survival.
Visitors to this exhibition have the opportunity to venture into the artists’ trajectories and be affected by the beings that inhabit this shapeless terrain of art. Along the way, it is possible to understand the photographic practice as a destination that brings together those who, when looking at the world, illuminate the paths of their own consciousness.
— Sinara Sandri
Essay on Liquid City by Frank Rodick
Click here.
Acknowledgements and thanks
(in no particular order)
Sinara Sandri
Carlos Crabalho
Ambassador James Lambert, OAS Secretary of Hemispheric Affairs from Canada
Ambassador Hugh Adsett Canada to the OAS
Pablo Zúñiga
Adriana Ospina
Greg Svitil
Nuria Clusela
Rafa Cruz
Leilani Campbell
Fabian Goncalves Borrega
Luciano Siqueira
Wendy Watriss
Fred Baldwin