The World

"I started thinking about this piece at a time when my attention was focused on possible relationships between places and their representations. These issues are present throughout my entire oeuvre, but a few elements, such as maps and travel guides, became more present starting in 2008, as I moved from Porto Alegre to Belo Horizonte for a year-long residency granted by Bolsa Pampulha.

The set of works that originated from that experience comprised the focus of research leading up to the production of The World. In 2009, I created a piece using travel guides to the city of Belo Horizonte. A total of 32 books were laid open on a table, always on different pages; the pictures on these pages were highlighted using a box cutter and folded to simulate a mockup. The idea was to think of what a city edited from out of the travel guide would be, physically speaking, with all locations shown from their best angles, photographed under the best possible weather conditions, sized based on the power they exert, and repeated according to their popularity. That experience made me want to consider creating a piece using travel guides from different places around the world.

The World came up the moment I envisioned the possibility to derive a fictional world from travel guides – a fictional world by the entertainment industry –, creating fantastic landscapes from decoded elements. Even though it is anchored on a conceptual issue, the piece is created as I dedicate myself to reading, analyzing, cutting and pasting each of these books. The construction plan for these places emerges from a literally incisive reading, done with a knife in my hand. Using different knives, the pictures were cut into micro-details and then pasted onto the surface of the books, in a process that could take weeks for each of the guides. This reading is radically different from that of a tourist, because I am not thinking of what I would like to do over 15, 7, or 3 days spent in that place. I am willing to understand what is this place contained in the book, what is the master plan for the construction of this space designed for consumption, and what is the image of the place that needs to become impregnated on the reader – often causing the actual experience of the place to be frustrating.

My references accumulate as my research and my life progress. Apart from advertising and literature, my connection with geography dates back from my childhood and the fact that this subject used to be one of my favorites at school. In geography class, I had the freedom to work with different materials, so long as I succeeded in representing, in a mockup, the relief, the vegetation or the urban or rural zone of the city.

Another key reference to this piece was the Chinese film The World, directed by Jia Zhangke, which Guilherme Wisnik recommended to me while following another project of mine.

The World tackles a world where success and importance is measured in miles covered. A world where tourism is growing at full speed and the strategies adopted follow the speculative standard whose primary aim is profit, and impacts are seldom considered. A world where any citizen can feel at home anywhere, although the anxiety when faced with the possibility of conquest ultimately inhibits one’s sense of belonging to a particular place or culture. Paradoxically, it is also a world where one can entertain the illusion of truly knowing without leaving one’s place, and these are some of the issues that have triggered the production process of this piece."

Daniel Escobar in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (October 2013)