Xeno-Mapa,
reconstruyendo
un
Altas

Ingmar Lähnemann

Paula Hurtado Otero’s installation seeks alternative mappings of our world. From the starting point that our ordinary Western map view of the world is distorted and exclusively anthropocentric, she has looked at alternative maps of the world, focusing on migrating birds that probably orient themselves by the Earth’s magnetic field and are unaware of abstract lines such as borders on our maps. To reflect on such an approach to the world from a human perspective, Paula Hurtado Otero asked four international friends, each of whom was asked to work on a particular bird that represents the area where these friends come from (marked and assigned on the floor in the installation). She asked her friends to write a text about the particular bird. The literary form and language of the texts were open. The friends subsequently recorded themselves reading the text. The question of foreignness as a category of mapping the world, which is alluded to in the title of the installation, is dealt with by means of the texts using the example of birds. (...). The preoccupations with birds are underpinned by their songs, taken from the website xeno-canto.org, which collects recordings and shares birds’ voices internationally. This method and archive influenced the title of the work. Several narratives, narrative levels and narrative modes come together in the audio part of the work and remain open to the visitors’ own connections, who are nevertheless left with a foreignness towards other world views. Alone by the impossibility of deciphering the texts of sounds the birds linguistically. The accompanying uncertainty as a basic condition for an appropriation of foreign perspectives is symbolized by the permanently turning compass rose. This makes it impossible to have our usual orientation usually possible by reading a compass rose.