JUAN DUQUE

ARTIST STATEMENT

RE-positioning

” I live not in myself, but I become
portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, …”
(Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, Canto III,  fragment of Stanza 72 – lines 680-682)

Being Colombian and defining myself as a nomad, I belong to a generation which has gradually left the country from the year 2000 on. This situation of cultural and geographical displacement has become the departing point of my art practice.
Through my artwork, I am constantly confronting my previous memories with the places I am living in or passing by.

Taking the place of an outsider, an observer, I would like to question how the condition of constant displacement allows me to inhabit multiple worlds, multiple places, multiple borders and multiple temporalities simultaneously and reflect this constant physical and cultural re-positioning onto my art practice.
I confront experiences and question creativity under conditions of:
- Migration
- Mobility
- Displacement
- Uncertainty
- Emergency
- Translation

By working mainly on ‘site specific’ installations, I explore and consider characteristics of the space that are normally overlooked; Like in archeology, processes in my work are the result of finding and revealing marks, traces, layers of information found in a specific site.
The main of my actions is to reveal the process of intense observation and interpretation together with associations and references to cultural and personal experiences.
By these means, I would like the visitor to get involved in a multi-sensorial experience where negotiation with the space might bring about empathy, but also confrontation and uncertainty about the notion of place and memory.

Re-positioning is a territorial struggle…

Juan Duque is part of BAM (Flemish institute for visual, audiovisual and media art)
You can contact him on +32 484 955 789 or dux92@hotmail.com