A multistep research / creation / exhibition project based on a comparative analysis between geographical islands of unique features.

STEP 1: One month living by myself on a remote island on a lake in North America.

@ Rabbit Island, Lake Superior, USA

Learn more about the Rabbit Island Residency Program

STEP 2: One month as an an artist in residence creating work based on my experience on the island.

​@ International School of Art and Design, Finlandia University, MI, USA.

STEP 3: Exhibition of work.

@ DeVos Art Museum, MI, USA

STEP 4:  Expedition through the South Atlantic Ocean from Río de Janeiro to Tristan da Cunha.

Mid january till late february 2016.

RESULT: FAILURE

​On January 2016 I joined an international group of 9 artists on a failed attempt to sail to Tristan da Cunha. We spent eighteen days -some standstill, some moving along the Brazilian coast - on our way to the island. Despite our expectations as a group to reach our destination, we had to leave the sailboat and abort the expedition altogether due to a series of unfortunate events and technical issues.

Addressing the history of disastrous expeditions, and embracing the sense of failure and the notion of unreachable land, all participant artists presented the exhibition Are we Moving, at metamatic:taf (Athens, Greece) during June – August 2016.

​Boa sorte y bons ventos, 2016, Josefina Muñoz

39 minutes 2-channel video

 “Boa sorte y bons ventos” reenacts a selection of real dialogues that took place on February 2016 in Brazil, as Josefina, one of the failed expedition participants, insistently searched for a boat and captain capable of sailing to Tristan da Cunha.

Recorded dialogues present no alterations from original email conversations, and show through their repetitive nature, the obsession and senselessness that characterized the unsuccessful boat quest.

Genuine footage from expedition is combined with a series of borrowed imagery including luxury boats, sailing kids, island drawings, Buzios and Tristan da Cunha footage, ocean storms, historic failed expeditions, sinking sailboats, and 3d rendered vessels, within others.

 The title, “Boa sorte y bons ventos”, translates as “Good luck and good winds”, a camaraderie jargon used by captains and ocean-people in the closure of their correspondence.

BORDERLESS LAND

As we migrated through the Lokwanamoru Mountains, I could understand that we were transiting through a context of rare, yet impeccable state of total isolation. Only the materiality of a few elements could reveal that we were in the 21st century: a plastic jerrycan to carry water, tier-rubber sandals, or the industrially loomed kitenge garment. Everything else was carefully handcrafted from wood and leather, as so were the traditions and cultural system. The scene could only be framed in a different time period; ages back.

Living with the Turkana nomads allowed me to gain a new understanding of the concept of space, place, and habitability. Likewise, the remoteness of the Ilemi Triangle epitomized the notion of isolation as an enduring imprint within my creative vocabulary. Somehow, while rambling through this dry and hot Sub-Saharan region I felt like an islander, in the reign of a borderless land, merely signified by twig bomas, utterly absent of any permanent demarcation.

INSULAR ISOLATION

The possibility of studying real insular isolation grew as an idea until it took the form of a multistep research, residency, and exhibition initiative. I have called this project Is_Land. Adhering to the premise that an island can be a geographical territory surrounded by water, but also a metaphor of sociocultural global issues, the Is_Land project focuses on a comparative analysis between the remotest inhabited island in the world, Tristan da Cunha, and other islands with unique features.

The fundamental question is to define whether a detached landmass can act as a mirror of our larger society, or if an island is an exception to the general rules that currently structure our world.

Rabbit Island, an uninhabited, pristine speck of protected land in the middle of a lake in North America, will be the first step in the process. While at Rabbit Island I will be exposed to complete solitude for around a month. The idea is to be alone. No reading, no music, no talking, no art making, no nothing. The goal is to use time exclusively to embrace the sense of solitude and to explore the island as a concept: as a space, as a place, as a metaphor.

Is_Land is an enticement to rethink the way we inhabit land and how we conceive of space – in the multifaceted sense of the concept, as defined by Carol Becker and Yi-Fu Tuan, as a set of relations, which not only refer to a material condition, but also to a complex sociocultural schema.

FRONTIERS

As I prepare to head to Rabbit Island, I can’t avoid thinking about the way spatiality is organized by frontiers (de Certeau), and how one should approach a borderline. Now, even if the assertion given by divortium aquarum seems respectable, I want to fully comprehend the essence of the immediate water boundary that delineates the land. The tide, the wave, and the current, all permeable topographical elements that demarcate space, are not equivalent to those imposed by human –the wall, the fence, the line. Yet, how can we entirely apprehend these natural or human-imposed perimeters?

At the end, the examination of an island -the land, the isolation, the concept, the perimeter- is nothing more (and nothing less) than a symbol for the actual examination of the distinction that divorces the object or subject (island or human) from its exteriority (world). Still, as stated by Donne, and sang by many through Brown’s classic reggae tune, no man is an island (…) every man is a part of the main.

Everything refers in fact to the differentiation which makes possible the isolation and interplay of distinct spaces. From the distinction that separates a subject from its exteriority to the distinctions that localize objects, from the home (constituted on the basis of the wall) to the journey (constituted on the basis of a geographical "elsewhere"), from the functioning of the urban network to that of the rural landscape, there is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers. 

 Michael de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984