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  Cabo Rojo Lighthouse
Ann Hamilton
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Espacio Tangente
Competition Guidelines

Cabo Rojo Lighthouse Reserve and salt-marshes

This site is without question, one of our most seductive natural sceneries, and all artistic intervention must be carefully conceived, relevant to the site, and minimally impacting on nature and the soil. The works should be placed along the entry road and the paths that visitors use when they leave their cars and start walking. They should blend with nature and not compete with the presence of the lighthouse, whose singularity demands a hierarchical role. Instead of loudly calling attention to themselves, the works to be located here should be in tune with the dry beauty of the site, taking their cues from the landscape in terms of form and color. Five works by different artists will be chosen and evaluated according to their affinity to the site and each other.

About the Area
Due to our geographical location, the seacoast is a favorite place for constructing identity symbols in the discourse of popular culture and tourism advertising campaigns. Beyond the stereotypes to which it is usually reduced, we perceive in the seacoast the possibility of alternating between the personal scale and vast panoramas, between the known and the unknown, between objective and abstract landscape. There is a captive audience that worships this setting as the ideal space for leisure and meditation.
Aphorism

Cabo Rojo Lighthouse

Multi-room sound and video installation, in which the phenomenological experiences of voices reading and hands writing becomes materialized through spinning speakers and projections in a visual and acoustic surround.

Since the moment of Agustine's reading silently to himself, reading has inhabited the scenes of solitude: the attic, the beach, the commuter train, scenes whose profound loneliness arise because of their proximity to a tumultuous life which remains outside their peripheries."
Susan Stewart

A lighthouse encapsulates most metaphors associated with the presence of light. It is a place which light physically calls. In continuous rotation, light sweeps and marks the arc where the territory of land and safe harbor meet the territory of the sea's vast horizon and depths. As a beacon of safety and navigation to guide vessels at sea, a lighthouse stands in our cultural imagination as an outpost, a singular sentinel where what is nature stands at the edge of what is culture. As a figure in the uninhabited landscape, the lighthouse has long represented what is near at hand that comes from afar. The light house at Cabo Rojo, where the waters of the Atlantic and the Caribbean meet, marks a turning point not only between land and water, near and far, horizon and verticality, but more importantly, between north and south and between the cultures and languages of Spanish and English.

The Installation:

" Hand writing is to space what the voice is to time"
Susan Steward

Just as the seashore marks the joint where land and water meet to erupt in waves, so the joint between bodily exterior and interior traces itself through the movements of words that aurally or silently enter the body through reading or hearing and then exit the body as speech or writing. This project materializes and makes tactile an immerse experience of those reciprocal processes.

Video and audio recordings of acts of reading and writing acts which proceed at the pace of the hand are present through multiple rotating speakers and projectors that fill the opened interior of the lighthouse with a throw of a whirling voice and the light and image of a circling text.

Sound- Six Mechanically propelled speakers will spin and rotate in circles, or rock back and forth. As the variable movement and velocity of the speakers throw sound, the interior of the lighthouse becomes filled with the echoing presence of "calling" voices.
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