A Postcard from Santiago
Rodrigo Zamora
28 September - 25 October 2007

Over the past few years Rodrigo Zamora’s practice has utilised public spaces, objects of ‘street furniture’ and the relationship between them within a variety of cities.
 
A Postcard from Santiago is an exhibition linked to a series of previous works in which public objects have been used as subjects, points of reference for perception, reminiscences and a consideration of everyday appropriations of public space by viewers and pedestrians.

In 2005, Zamora exhibited Prototipo público (public prototype) at H10 Gallery, Valparaíso, Chile. A space not dissimilar to The Kiosk, H10 Gallery is a compact space for site specific art projects. For both opportunities Zamora created objects that depict public tin boxes in very accurate scale models made with cardboard, PVC tubes and enamel.

Here in Christchurch, Zamora has produced a new scale model made in the form of public objects familiar to Santiago, the city where he currently lives, specifically for installation within The Kiosk.

Zamora sees his efforts within this form of publicly accessible exhibition space as an exciting opportunity to establish dialogues between his work and local viewers which here presumably perceive A Postcard from Santiago as an extremely unfamiliar object to New Zealand eyes. In his work, references to the public forum of the streets is at the same time an inquiry about the condition of the pedestrian and their relationship to the city as text defined by the movements of people on a daily basis.

Zamora’s gesture of positioning a replica of a public object from Santiago out of context within the space of The Kiosk seeks to establish a cultural dialogue between both locations and consider the metaphorical space of the city as universally experienced by pedestrians.