Obviously, this is a simplistic way of describing a move that, in fact, is highly challenging both artistically and philosophically. ‘Effi & Amir’ not only reframe it, but they also intervene within the pictures of ‘Google Street View’, by mixing them with other footage and enabling them to reveal other stories. Their work questions perception and representation, authorship and appropriation, time and space correlation and it points to the surprising shift in the western concept of mapping – from abstraction to the anecdotic.

“Let us start from the middle” includes three projects: a new video-work titled “The Vanishing Vanishing-Point” and “As If”, five-channel video installation. These projects were jointly developed in collaboration with artists from Albania and Kosovo. Both works will be exhibited for the first time. In addition, results drawn from the workshop “Tirana Collective Mental Mapping” developed with young people from Tirana will be shared.

In this case, “The middle” refers to the arbitrary character of the world-view that ‘Google Street View’ offers, questioning at the same time the centrality OR denial of hierarchy and/or linearity.

The exhibition engages with the current location where the artists live, in Brussels and the city where the exhibition will take place, in Tirana. The fictional space of ‘Google Street View’ is transformed into a tool that allows them to address issues related to both realities at once. The fictional enables them to engage critically and put into question power structures in the European Union, the institutions that represent it and ‘Google Street View’ system.

Credits: Pleurad Xhafa

http://www.tiranaartlab.org