ABSTRACT
To engage in a discussion of why geography has been so important for the development of my artistic practice, I need to think back to the moment when I entered the professional world, for it encapsulated the early conjunction between geography and visual culture. By the late 1980s, when I graduated from art school, discourse on art was already considerably “contaminated” by other theoretical currents – such as ethnography, urbanism, cultural and media studies, post-colonial criticism, and feminist theories – which not only represented new content but also provided instruments for reformulating the domain of symbolic production. It had become evident that art theory would no longer be the sole frame of reference for an aesthetic practice which would now have to position itself in relation to other terrains of knowledge production. This important discursive expansion coincided with the vigorous onset of globalization processes and a turn, in the arts, towards content-oriented work, enabling precisely this connection of diverse strands of critical interpretation. I sensed the necessity of developing an aesthetic practice that could respond to this complex and rather unique condition.
