In 2018 I visited Copenhagen for the first time, in two weeks I acquired several strangerships (commitments to a stranger). I met Peter, Sonja, Dagny, and an Ole Wanscher’s credenza key in fortuitous and hazardous ways. A visitor of lives instead of nations, I entered their world and charted routes to connect my life with them. I curated facts and synchronicities to weave relationships between things that don’t belong together: them and me, a found object with a man, a found place with an object, a familiar object with a foreign person. Eventually, these exchanges grew into systems, territories that host other strangers and nonliving beings, involving them in significant interactions and creating new relational semantics.

In this exhibition, I revise four of these systems and reflect on the practice of displacing myself, embracing my role as “el otro” – the other, the foreigner or stranger-, and the consequent entitlement to find unexpected relationships between objects, places, and persons, fiction and facts, the personal and impersonal.

“El Otro” is my version of a relational militant practice to resist the fear and aversion to the other, to negate the separation of the world and the things that form it, to compensate the omnipresent access to millions of people that we can only pseudo-know through media, and to stand against the investor-oriented economy of affection that rules most of our interactions.

Medium: research project / Relational/performative notation

Year: 2018 -
Exhibited in: ReShape Exhibition, Prague College MA Fine Art final exhibition
Pragovka Gallery

Keywords: relational, phenomenology, the other

Concept: Cristina Maldonado
Mentor: Fernanda Eugenio, Mario de Vega, Sodja Lotker,Branislava Kuburović