Norte Sur / South is North, is a reinterpretation of popular cartography and dominant geographies. It is a traveling object, a contemporary World Atlas, and a book of maps made in collaboration with participants from around the world.

In 2015 I completed a photographic book, featuring over 30 cities from around the world both in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. This book has been divided by half, with each part touring the world and moving in the opposite direction to counterpart.

Norte / Sur # 1 (2011) 

The first version of the project includes 10 videos recorded in different countries, as well as one sculpture and a video projection. The locations of the videos include: the US, Colombia, Brazil, Iceland, The Netherlands, Namibia, Russia, Yemen, W Australia and South Korea.

The exhibition took place in an empty commercial space in Pittsburgh PA, on March of 2011.This is the first piece of an on-going body of work. It is a collection of videos that show two places located within the same geographical longitude, but one in the Southern and the other in the Northern hemisphere. Both places are seen through a glass lens that alters the orientation of the horizon line in the final images.

This piece seeks to motivate a re-interpretation of conventional visions of planetary landscapes (distant abstractions from a birds-eye view point), by challenging the idea of verticality as a geopolitical paradigm. It also brings into question the traditional representation of world maps, while re-thinking the division or duality between ‘North’ and ‘South’, as unstable and inaccurate conceptual categories of ‘the global’.Two videos were recorded in different locations and similar times, following the same instruction: put a magnifying lenses in front of the landscape in order to invert the image. The installation includes also a short video of a handwritten transcription of the 10th law of gravity by Newton, which says:

Two bodies attracting each other mutually, describe similar figures about their common center of gravity, and about each other mutually – Newton, Laws of gravity.

The entire text was written upside down, so the reader could experience a radical change of the orientation of the text, as well as the act of reading it.

Thanks to all my collaborators:

Sonia Pérez, Western Australia
Saskia Weltevrede, The Netherlands
Servaas Van Den Bosh & Tafadzwa Chirunda,  Namibia
Lana Vogestad, Iceland
Arkady Tyurin, Saint-Petersburg – Russia
Sun Il Kim, South Korea
Thiago Galvão Hersan, São Paulo – Brazil
Paola Uribe, Yemen
Carlos Mario Camacho, Colombia