Gran Horizonte: Around the Day in 80 Worlds
Streaming period: 72-hours
Genres: Documentary
Duration: 33 minutes
Availability: Worldwide
Our installation, “Gran Horizonte”, takes its name from a restaurant and bar in Caracas. The establishment has attracted U-TT’s attention and patronage for years, serving as the locus point for work meetings and late nights. Inside, cow-themed black and white spots define the visual mood, coating the wallpaper and waiters’ aprons. For us, while nostalgia runs deep within the glowing cursive of the restaurant’s sign, its semantics run deeper. U-TT has often turned toward the notion of a grand horizon, that conceptual hybridity between a boundary and infinity, location and imagination, memory and discovery.
The horizon, as a concept, lends itself to the tempting construction of binaries. Most literally, the horizon is what divides the sky from the earth’s surface. Conventionally, we think of that surface being populated by ships on an ocean, cowboys on a mountain, or buildings on a cityscape, all silhouetted against the orange and pink heavens. Perhaps U-TT’s most frequently visited horizon is the blurry line between formal and informal. While simplistic definitions of this binary can be summarized as top-down development versus bottom-up growth, U-TT sees a more nuanced picture.
Informality is not a lack of form or order (that would be non-formality), but rather the state of being in formation. It is the constant introspection of forms through trial and error, the refinement of forms through spontaneous experimentation rather than static acceptance of tradition. And above all, informality is perhaps the process of getting past modernity’s fetish with form itself by denying form static supremacy. The horizon between formal and informal is a horizon of processes rather than products. The difference between the two is one of perspective. This is appropriate, as horizons are also inherently about orientation, marking one’s present position in relation to where one was in the past, or will be in the future. The setting sun is a sign of both the day that has just passed and the day to come. Fittingly, our video installation has no beginning or end, hopscotching cyclically through the temporal flows of a day and night around the world. We aim to decentralize and destabilize the flâneur, itself a modern form, and arrive at a more disorderly yet inclusive outlook.
As the writer Avi Alpert has written, “to return to the horizon is to remind ourselves of the fact that we cannot make worlds, we cannot imagine a better future, we cannot create a ‘new image of the human,’ until we have come to terms with the irrepressible demands of the world we have already created.” U-TT returns constantly to the horizon, not to dream of utopian forms, but to grapple with the reality of our cities in an effort to improve them. The horizon is about claiming a right to the present, for only through this assertion can one claim the right to move forward.
