Not from Here, Nor a Tourist
2023 / Digital Video, 13m 08s
Drone Footage: Carlos Campos
Voice-over: Olan Monk

Gaspar Cohen (b. 1992, Brazil) is an artist and researcher interrogating the capital-colonial complex embedded in digital technologies through process-intensive computation. Their work often involves digital manipulation of images and sound, experimenting with noises, technical errors and systemic failures. In Nem Daqui, Nem Turista [Not from Here, Nor a Tourist], Cohen delves into the speculative potentials of the digital to reflect on the spectrality and displacement of power that are embedded in the colonial gaze and its current reverberations.

Drawing from images of the last standing tropical palm tree of the Palácio Iglésias’ long-lost ‘exotic’ garden, Cohen presents us with an audiovisual piece that simulates the viewpoint and task of a future entity that attempts, with great difficulty, to grasp the form and purpose of this ‘unattainable’ object. Through its gaze, we are called to reflect on this evaluating gesture, its dislocation of value and meaning, and positioning of power – tasks with striking similarities to the present work of curators, museums, artists and researchers. As the title suggests, this inciting gesture is expanded towards Lisbon’s present conditions where the colonial past of resource exploitation and trade sits amidst a tourist-focused economic destabilization of its urban and social-political environments.

^{Curatorial: Lia Carreira
Exhibition Design: Seth Weiner & Bernhard Garnicnig
Funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport (BMKÖDS) and the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna, Austria (MA 7)}