Map Icon

2020

What is the point?
Savior, deliverance, a secular sign of the cross for wanderers, like me, who get lost even in a known territory. Also devilish, treacherous, a double agent crossing my boundaries, trespassing my most private zones: all the better to know me, to sell me.

Where is the point?
Café, doctor, school, mother, lover, shop, park, friend—the loci of a life pinned down again and again, yet another dot in the data-Pointillism of surveillance capitalism. They call it Location Services—the mundane mapping of you and me turned to profit by technology.

What is the point?
The pin implies security, finality: departure or destination, nothing between. It is the opposite of art, which resists fixation, and which is endlessly agile, curious. Art refuses any one standpoint, seeks the critical position. It invites you to lose your bearings, accept the wonder of not knowing, the surprise of landing somewhere unexpected.

Who is the point?
A man-made marker, seemingly objective, the pin is another expression of the three-dimensional geographic coordinate system. I use the pin, continuously locating and re-locating, but not quite finding myself, not all of me, not all at once.

Text: Priya Basil

Presented in exhibitions

Base Progetti per l´arte, Florence, 2020
Kunsthalle Tübingen, 2021