Tangent Projects

Project 19

Top Down - Bottom Up - Natalia Morales

Curated by Tsering Frykman-Glen
January 15th - February 26th 2021, Tangent Projects gallery.

Click here to read Natalia’s interview with Andrea Mora for Delfino.

Top Down - Bottom Up is part of an ongoing process of experimental research, in which new possibilities of rethinking the territory are explored through cartography and public space. Motivated by transforming and reformulating the reality of the territory through the imaginary.

As Foucault declared, the territory - beyond being an object - is an action over which control is exercised. It was, and is, constructed from exercises of power by way of the physical, the symbolic and the intangible, practices constantly used in processes of conquest and colonialization. They have imposed on us a unique way of world representation, of travelling it and understanding it. Cities have developed by controlled paths based on political and patriarchal interests.

Within this context where capitalism reigns - only interested in the present, the immediate, mass consumerist and market circulation - much in the same way that globalising strategies use territory as a mechanism of domination and speculation. Consequently proliferating a series of disjointed, decontextualized, disconnected or forgotten places in the urban landscape, thusly causing industrial, social, and cultural precariousness and creating a system that exercises supremacy and prevents any transformation of hope for change outside of that order.

Increasingly alienated and immersed in the impulsive world of digitisation, social networks and mobility applications (Google Maps, Waze, Bing etc), a condition has been triggered in us, in which the control systems have caused an inability to imagine, to construct subjectivities, and for us to lose our individual autonomy. Therefore, making critical thinking impossible, in front of a paranoid co-dependent state, characterized by anxiety and collective alienation; compliant to a “ society of the virtual spectacle" and the "mainstream".

In this context of accelerated changes, this state between fiction and the reality of the environment we find ourselves in, there is a heightened need to draw other narratives that can stimulate our imagination.

Natalia has created an atlas of possible world maps. Her intention is to generate a dissolution of territories and borders in order to replace them with imaginary divisions and dilated spaces - where the recognizable and utilitarian representation of the map disappears. Moreover, composing dystopian cartography which leaves a mark, appropriates space and speculates between the imaginary and reality. She proposes a series of fragmented, fragile and sensitive territories, where the imaginary manifests itself as a position in which this state of instability, uncertainty and disorientation that we constantly fear, can be extremely fruitful. Approaching the construction of micro-utopias that disarticulate the apocalyptic, or the sweetened vision of reality imposed by the hegemonic power structures.

Imagination will act as an emancipatory impulse in order to delineate an antagonistic cartography. By suggesting new alternatives to re-conquer, re-invent and appropriate the territory, and subverting the current cartographic use of a biopolitical control mechanism towards a critical device and will claim action.

Top Down - Bottom Up is a collection of material from over the last four years, linking different stages of experimentation that are connected and interwoven in an explorative process, from a subjective, intuitive, sensitive and feminine point of view. The material has been compiled into a site-specific installation at Tangent Projects gallery.

Natalia Morales is a Costa Rican artist that lives and works in Barcelona.

Natalia's work explores the territorial transformations that surround contemporary geography, urban strategies and models promoted by globalising-capitalist policies, which have triggered a series of uncertain futures, disjointed, decontextualized, disconnected or forgotten places. She employs cartographic logic in approaching the various urban ecosystems, as a device for critical and claim action.

Her projects are based upon transversality, participation and social integration, in which other possibilities are proposed in order to make and reformulate the processes of regeneration and urban intervention. With the intention of recovering the autonomy of the territory and the right to the city, through debate and collective expression, she experiments with different media such as installation, mural painting, digital media, performance, archive and video.

Natalia studied Fine Arts with an emphasis on Environmental Design, at the National University of Costa Rica, She completed her Master in Contemporary Artistic Creation, at the University of Barcelona - in which she published her research project: “Urban Cartography: Conquest of a Global Geography".

She has also worked as a curator in the On Mediation / 3 project, directed by Ana Maria Guash, Martí Perán and the Art, Globalization and Interculturality Research Group (AGI), at the Faculty of History of the University of Barcelona.

Currently, Natalia collaborates in various public art and urban regeneration projects / Rebobinart (Barcelona) / Nomada Urbana (Bolivia). She also directs the collective project "A line made by...", a collaboration with the curator Gisela Chillida, in which a series of ephemeral/itinerant interventions are carried out upon different urban contexts (San José, Seville, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona).