Felipe Cama

YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION – FELIPE CAMA in conversation with mariana tassinari

Monitoring is a reality that interests me a lot and led me to this work. If you have a smartphone in your pocket, several companies know where you are, your whereabouts. And they analyze all this information, Big Data, and and then sell it. When crossing the data, they know that you pass by this street at lunchtime, three times a week. So you're using Waze, for example, and suddenly a McDonald’s ad pops up on the screen, exactly because there's a McDonald’s on your way and it's lunchtime. If you “like” Italian food on your profile, this allows them to reach out to the owner of an Italian restaurant and offer: “look, I have a thousand people that like Italian food and pass by this street every day”. This series of works addresses the notion of monitoring and privacy or, in fact, the notion that we don’t have this privacy for a while now.

Behind all this is the idea of ​​control. Control, observation, surveillance, monitoring by these huge corporations - from the government, from the state, from the big telecommunication companies.

For me, this is related to the land issue, the theme of this edition of Amarello. The land as a commercial space, real estate, a settlement of large corporations. When I was told that the theme would be "earth/land”, I thought about it. I didn't think exactly about the countryside, about nature, but about your space, the space you use and which is no longer free.

Besides that, the notion of abstract or figurative emerge as issues to be thought about. Some people see different figures in these works, as if they see drawings in the clouds. My daughter saw the head of a horse in one and a guitar in another. Some people say that another painting looks like the map of Italy. Anyway, to what extent this is abstraction and to what extent it is figurative? The fact is that these paintings are done through a process. I document on Google Maps all the routes I take along a given day. The exact path is never predetermined by me, so each time a different drawing comes out. The lines that divide the color blocks are what would be the blue lines in Google Maps, which, when crossed, create geometric shapes. I worked this way for years, not knowing what the end result would be. I was only interested in marking the ways. After collecting a multitude of drawings, I selected the ones that suited me, the ones that aesthetically most interested me.

Each work is a polyptych. In them, each color is a different canvas that fits together. I retraced these paths in a software called Illustrator, and developed the canvas frames in these weird formats. When painting, I wanted to make the brush strokes visible, marked on the canvas, to precisely contrast with the digital, to make a counterpoint with what before was only pixels, and to have a material reference of the paint and the gesture. For me, it is very important to mark this transition from the virtual to the physical.

I really like Sol LeWitt, all those American minimalists. They had the practice of isolating work from life. I don't go that far, I'm talking a lot about life in these works, but some of their practices are interesting. That you name the works by numbers - some of them called their works Untitled 1, Untitled 2, Untitled 3. In my series, the title of each work is also a number, a code: the date on which I made the route drawings. Year month day. 2012 05 12, 2017 01 10.

Sol LeWitt, specifically, predetermined what each of his drawings would look like through a rule, a command to be obeyed. Drawing is important, but I don't sit and draw freehand. I create routines and rules that will result in drawings. In this case, I would leave my house, record the path and, when I return back home, I’d have a drawing on the computer. The result was a drawing that I discovered at the end of the day. If I encountered heavy traffic on the way and Waze sent me here or there, the design would change.

I believe that the work is richer when it allows for multiple readings, multiple approaches. The name of the series, You Have Reached Your Destination, besides being the frase you listen at the end of the route on Waze, carries a dose of irony. Is that the destiny?

Originally published on Amarello Magazine - 2020.