The Geometry of Space
- AboutThe Geometry of Space, 2014
Part 3 of Scams (I must first apologise) project
Sculptures, stretched oxidised steel, approximate diameter 80 cm
Scams Atlas, 3 publications In an attempt to make their scams convincing to their victims, the scammers borrow facts from recent political, economic, religious, environmental, or financial events. The scammers choose various countries to provide a location to their story, usually destinations where corruption is plausible. They focus on Africa, Asia, Russia, or the Middle East where wars recent revolutions, or the fall of dictators serve as material. - Other Installations
These scams outline a map of contemporary conflicts, a symptom of the state of the world and in a certain way, suggest another way of writing a country or a region’s history. Consequently, a new history of the contemporary world is traced progressively, alongside a colonial geography, a fantasy based on corruption, and possible dynamics between North and South, the economic divisions between them, and representations of one or the other. In the exhibition, this fantasized mapping of corruption is shown through a series of sculptures and drawings seeking to capture the circulation of the emails, focusing on their geographic travels.
The locations and countries that appear in a selection of over two hundred emails per year are used to identify trajectories whose coordinates (latitude and longitude) coincide with different events around the world. The trajectories are materialized with steel bands that give shape to a globe, and physical reality to the virtual network, as a chronic of events in a year’s worth of scams.
Three sculptures are presented in the consecutive exhibition spaces, corresponding to three prolific years in Internet advance-fee fraud production: 2005, 2008, and 2010. In each room, the dated and localized trajectories around the globe are drawn separately on the walls of the spaces, in chronological order. Three “scams atlases” are also presented, gathering all the selected emails for those three specific years.
