Sofía Fernández Blanco
she/her
Argentinian
Thesis: Alternative maps: a strategy for emancipation
Work: (Dis)placed Geographies
My graduation piece is a large-scale installation consisting of a sand landscape, a 3-channel projection, 4 wooden objects sitting on concrete beams, and text.
This installation explores land reclamation from its two sides: the new geographies taken from the sea, and the places from where the fill material was sourced to claim the land.
"Land reclamation is a strange term. It seems to imply a former ownership, claiming a territory back. But land reclamation is actually pushing away the sea, taking an area from it and filling it with enormous amounts of rock and sand. It creates land that was not there before. In every single grain of the sand used, there is a story of the Earth. Starting as rocks in the high mountains, it goes down through rivers and is broken into smaller and smaller pieces, reaching the sea in a process that takes thousands or even millions of years. The new geographies of land reclamation are made out of these relics from far away places, sucked out and transported on ships. Uprooted, displaced, fragmented to later be packed again in both landscape and the blocks of concrete that make the buildings that stand on it. The is a sense of loss tied to land reclamation. Loss of the places from which the sand was mined, but also for the coastline that was forcefully receded further and further away to make more space. How can we articulate the experience of watching the flowing sea become solid ground?
If a boundary is not where something stops, but a place where something begins its presencing, then the landscape made through reclamation is just as important as what has been erased." - Excerpt from installation text.
