susana eslava- english portfolio
DESCRIPTION
PROJECT PORTFOLIOTRANSCRIPT
SUSANA ESLAVAproject portfolio
Web : www.estudiomarzo.com
City: Bogota, Colombia
Telephone: (57)(1)2569462
Celphone: (57)(315)6777371
E-mail : [email protected]
CONTACT
INDEX BY PAGE
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pagenumber name
CHAPTER 01 02
1. 111111111x111111111=12345678987654321 032. INSERTION 063. MIRADOR 084. FROM: TO: 115. WORDS 126. MONOCHROMES 147. INVERTION 168. NEW TOPOGRAPHY 199. GRID 2110. COLONIAL 2211. PUBLIC SPACE INTERVENTION 24
CHAPTER 02 25
12. DROPLET GARDEN 2613. WILD LIFE CROSSING PATH 2914. OBSERVATION TOWER 3215. SCENOGRAPHY IN THE MAMM 3616. PROJECT FOR A POOL 3917. ORCHARD 4218. ALLUVIAL VALLEY 43
CHAPTER 03 45
19. INSTALLATION IN PUBLIC SPACE LAB 4620. S-M.A.O MODEL WORKSHOP AND EXHIBITION 5021. BOGOTA FLOODING WORKSHOP 5322. BR +/- 5523. ALFREDO ROMAN REC IDENCY PROJECT 5724. RESTREPORAMA 5925. LES ATELIERS 64
CHAPTER 04 66
26. EL JARILLON 6727. TOWARDS THE HILL 6928. BOGOTA HILLS BIRD GUIDE 71
Contemporaneity is a temporary measurement that implies the present as the time when things happen. But, as past and future, present time depends on its previous and its following and it suddenly disappears. Contemporaneity contains it all and is empty at the same time: everything has been said; everything has been thought, all is all-ready- made. The following selection of projects, deal with the impossibility of parting from an intention of saying/making/thinking something new, and instead gamble everything on the way they say/make/think what already exists. Through diverse mediums and materials, these works are all dissimilar but the same: they propose space as a field of configuration that communicates with the elements it contains and with the body that inhabits through different relations. The exploration of these associations is an art practice of contemporaneity; how we inhabit space, is how we build it.
CHAPTER 1
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The theory of sets implies the possibility to form sets of things with variable amount and kind of components; it is possible to think about a set of things composed by an elephant, an atomic bomb and a song. However, when one tries to refer to the biggest and broadest sets of all, it is impossible to think about it without referring to a bigger set that could contain it. This relation goes on and on without finding an end. It is possible to think infinity, not as a system that functions through invention, but as one possible through reconfiguring the existing: originality is excluded. The project uses a patrimonial building as a sculpture mold and sand as the matter of the piece that can be reconfigured in infinite ways.
Medium: installation/ sculpture: filling an entire space with sand
Year: 2010
Dimensions: (H x W x D): 6 x 8 x 3.5 m; 15 m3 (3 trucks) of sand
Place: former hat factory “Richard”, patrimonial building, University of los Andes campus, Bogotá, Colombia
Support: building
SPECIFICATIONS
2.INSERTION
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St. Cruz de la Sierra is a city in the south of Bolivia characterized by a mixture of occidental influences and indigenous manifestations; racism and discrimination goes back and forth between different groups. In this encounter of cultures, identity is jeopardized and nationality becomes a point of rivalry. The project proposes a point for truce: the word that traduces “I belong” is translated into eight of the languages commonly spoken in the city, excluding Spanish, the official language of Bolivia. Words become symbols, which become graphics, which become universally legible.
Medium: hundreds of printed posters with the sentence (word) “I belong” translated to Russian, German, Mandarin, Portuguese, Japanese and the three Bolivian languages Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani. The words were printed in different typographies
Year: 2010
Dimensions: 1000 posters
Place: St. Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia
Support: paper posters printed in black and white
SPECIFICATIONS
3.MIRADOR
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The project is set to be located on the main square of Lima, in the historic center of the city. It consists on very long stairs that cross through the plaza, forming a spiral that reaches a 25m height. On the highest point of the stairs, a lighthouse constantly spinning at a low pace, projects the old perimeter of the city on the facades of the buildings that surround the plaza. From the top of the stairs it is possible to watch the projection of the mountains and the sea that surround Lima, but that are no longer visible, behind the new skyline of buildings.
Medium: installation/architecture: Centro Abierto 2012, international Competition.
Year: 2012
Dimensions: (H x W x D): 25 x 30 x 15 mt
Place: Lima, Peru
Support: scaffoldings, stairs and lighthouse
SPECIFICATIONS
4.FROM : TO :
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The object of desire stands in the edge of uniqueness. Everything can be personalized, all things can be customized. Nevertheless, the canons that define our modes seem to be homogeneous rather than unique. When the object becomes massive, the real object of desire becomes one-self.
Medium: video/ performance: video of a person gift wrapped
Year: 2009
Dimensions: 7 rolls of gift wrap
Place: Bogota, Colombia
Support: video, gift wrap
SPECIFICATIONS
5.WORDS
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The flow of information is not only determined by the content of any given discourse, but by its mode: the way it is expressed. Language can acquire configuration properties that go beyond the simple action of ordering letters, syllables or words to create an evident meaning; instead, the language structure can become a malleable and changing mechanism that can determine the way the bodies perceive and process information. This way, the oral speech deconstructs itself and becomes an experience.
Medium: video installation: 4 videos of the same speech (a learning reader textbook for children), each one at a different rhythm or frequency. None of the speeches are clearly audible: the speeches cannot be understood. All of the videos are played at a very loud volume, in 4 T.V monitors, inside a dark room
Year: 2009
Dimensions: 4 monitors of 60 x 60 cm in a room of 9 m2
Place: Bogota, Colombia
Support: video, T.V. monitors, dark room
SPECIFICATIONS
6.MONOCHROMES
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The project approaches paint from the space that it inhabits as a domestic element to the state of art where it becomes a valuable piece and is no longer part of the ordinary.
Medium: installation / painting: square monochromes are painted on the walls of houses around the center of Bogota using the exact same paint as the one previously used on each of the intervened walls.
Year: 2009
Dimensions: variable from 1.50 x 1.50m to 0.60 x 0.60m
Place: Bogota, Colombia
Support: new paint on old paint
SPECIFICATIONS
7.INVERSION
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The residential houses of St. Cruz de la Sierra have enormous gardens of many kinds. They are exuberant in size, volume and species. To arbitrarily inverse the regularity of two landscapes; the house and the garden, leads to observe them inside their own fictional contexts. The gardens, that represent the natural manifestation of landscape trough nature, become as artificial as any house
Medium: installation: gardens are put inside a residential house
Year: 2010
Dimensions: two trucks filled up with plants (bushes and flowers) inside a 150m2 house
Place: St. Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia
Support: plants, house
SPECIFICATIONS
8. NEW TOPOGRAPHY
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Landscape keeps detaching itself from its natural origin and getting closer to its artificial character. It is possible to think landscape as a constant changing construction. These changes are activated by the inhabitation of space: by the presence of the body, the relations growing between itself and the elements that occupy a place. Reading these relations might seem a naive and subversive gesture at a time: it is not absolute, but it is open to many possibilities of experiencing space.
Medium: installation/ sculpture: topographic intervention
Year: 2009
Dimensions: 20m2 of grass on a 180m2 grass surface
Place: “El bobo”, permanence area, University of los Andes campus, Bogota, Colombia
Support: grass
SPECIFICATIONS
9.GRID
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The grid system is in many ways indisputable: it has certain elements and objects that codify it and define its functionality. Breaking these objects into smaller pieces, separating joints and reconfiguring areas is one way of de-gridding. The disarticulation of the gridding language generates a new grid with no specific value, which stands between the finished and the unfinished matter of drawing.
Medium: installation/ drawing
Year: 2009
Dimensions: 99 glass pieces of 5 x 5 cm
Place: Bogota, Colombia
Support: spray paint over glass, lightbox
SPECIFICATIONS
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All the houses in La Candelaria have floors of colonial tiles. These archi-tectonical elements were based on organic forms of flowers and plants, translated into geometrical figures that became the patterns for the tiles. The project consists on taking these repetitive forms to the outside of a house and occupying the exact dimensions of a domestic space of its interior. The reconfiguring of these symbols proposes a new way of approaching and inhabiting the space of both the house and the street.
Medium: installation/ painting: stencil of colonial typical tiles of a colonial house in la Candelaria
Year: 2010
Dimensions: 30 m2
Place: La Candelaria, historic neighborhood, Bogota, Colombia
Support: white paint on black asphalt
SPECIFICATIONS
11. PUBLIC SPACE INTERVENTION page:24
A project that was ment to be site specific changes location and moves to the public space. All of the pretentions behind a work of art are susceptible of being transformed by the most simple but inevitable forces of all: experience. This is perhaps what makes art so random and powerful at the same time.
Medium: installation/ sculpture: filling an entire space with sand
Year: 2012
Dimensions: (H x W x D): 3 x 10x 3.5 m; 10 m3 of sand, old truck tires
Place: The inside and outside of M.I.A.M.I. an independent art exhibition space in Bogota.
Support: building/street
SPECIFICATIONS
The definition of the landscape concept is adhered to the action of observation of the landscape, which implies the bilateral equation between the landscape’s inhabitant (the observer) end the terrain observed (the landscape). Landscape is built at the same time it is conceived, acquires multiple possibilities of existence and refuses to establish itself in a hermetic definition: the landscape is a geographic space, but is also a temporal, social and political space.
CHAPTER 2
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12. DROPLET GARDEN, 2013 CHINA JINZHOU WORLD LANDSCAPE ART EXPOSITION
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The project was created for an international landscape competition. The requirements of the competition meant that the competitors developed a garden based on the natural characteristics of their own places of origin. The design team (3 architects + 1 artist + 1 botanic), all Colombian, proposed a garden inspired on the variety and irregularity of the Colombian topography. The plant species that were selected to build the project belonged to genres and species of Chinese plants affiliated to Colombian species, so the entire garden had a configuration of two places of origin in different extremes of the world.
Medium: landscape architecture - competition (winner) / project realized with Diana Wiesner.
Year: 2011
Dimensions: 3000 m2
Place: Jinzhou, China
Support: earth, plants, concrete, wood, stone, water.
SPECIFICATIONS
13.WILDLIFE CROSSING PATH, TWO PROPOSALS
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The proposals for a wildlife crossing project located on the Oil Perforation area of Caño Limon, Arauca. The project consisted on designing a hanging bridge/crossing path for small animals such as porky pines, ant eating bears and monkeys between two areas of wild forest that were separated by the construction of a main road and a train rail. The project is planned to cover a trajectory of approximately 200m and reach a maximum height of 15 m approx. using sustainable materials for construction and seeking the conservation of the forests in their original conditions. The materials specified for the construction of the project were reforestation wood and metallic cords that support the weight of the animals. For the development of this project, the proposals were based on the natural behavior of the native species of the area, their sizes and displacement habits.
Medium: landscape intervention
Year: 2012
Dimensions: 180 linear m
Place: Caño Limon, Arauca, Colombia
Support: wooden structure and steel wire
SPECIFICATIONS
14.OBSERVATION TOWER, TWO PROPOSALS
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The project proposals have special interest in the development of architectural and landscape structures that can articu-late the natural environment of Arauca with the oil industry of the region, giving priority to the conservation and protection of the natural species, the water reservoirs and the entire ecosystem. The project consisted in the design proposal and development for an observation tower located on the Oil Perforation zone of Caño Limon, Arauca. It has the objective of becoming a natural site for the area, for recreational and pedagogical uses. Both of the proposals for the project are thought to be sustainable regarding the use of ecological materials and planning: recycled oil pipelines and reforestation wooden pieces. From the viewpoint of both the towers, it is possible to see the infinite extension of flat land that reaches Venezuela.
Medium: landscape architecture
Year: 2011
Dimensions: 30m2; 25 m high
Place: Caño Limon, Arauca, Colombia
Support: Recycled oil pipeline, wood
SPECIFICATIONS
15. SCENOGRAPHY FOR THE ALTERNATIVE USES FESTIVAL IN THE MODERN ART MUSEUM OF MEDELLIN
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The Alternative Uses Festival is an initiative of exhibition and interaction of different proposes of food, design, art and architecture that believe in recycling and alternative uses and materials as a production base for a sustainable lifestyle. The spirit of the entire project is based on bricolage and on the interpretation of uses hidden in things. The proposal was based on industrial scaffoldings which are normally employed for construction work, and that would eventually return to its regular use; and on wooden crafts to build an organic food market, the crafts functioned both as the structure for the market and as the display devices for the food.
Medium: installation/stands: 20 stands for de design exhibition held in the festival and 1 organic food market.
Year: 2011
Dimensions: (H x W x D): 3 x 1.4 x 40 m for the stands, 137 wooden crates for the market
Place: Alternative Uses Festival, MAMM, Modern Art Museum of Medellin, Colombia
Support: wooden crates and scaffoldings
SPECIFICATIONS
16. PROJECT FOR A POOL
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The pool is based on its surrounding landscape. La Calera is a suburbia area of Bogota located in the middle of the mountains. Its hills and valleys seem to vanish the proximity of the city and create an incredible perspective of nature and solitude. The proposal is based on maintaining the original topography of the surroundings by designing underground facilities and services. The geometrical forms that the design suggests allude to a direct dialogue with the nature of this place.
Medium: landscape architecture- private competition (winner)
Year: 2012
Dimensions: 1100 m2
Place: La Calera, Colombia
Support: earth, plants, concrete, wood, stone, water, plants, glass, construction materials.
SPECIFICATIONS
17.ORCHARD
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The project of this small orchard is located in the area of the hills of Bogota, surrounded by nature and an incredible view. The orchard is for the use of a family and it intends to create a domestic space outside the limits of the house that can incentive the gardening practice.
Medium: landscape architecture/ carpentry: landscape intervention
Year: 2011
Dimensions: (H x W x D): 4 x 4 x4 m
Place: La Calera, Colombia
Support: wood
SPECIFICATIONS
18.ALLUVIAL VALLEY
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Valdivia is a small touristic city on the south of Chile. It is surrounded by an immense wetland ecosystem on one side, the mountains on another and the river that limits with the ocean. In 2010, after the earthquake on Chile, its harbor was destroyed and this competition was open for design proposals. The project proposes to imagine the urban growth of Valdivia through the sustainable development of its natural environment. Development and growth do not have to be synonym of separation of nature and men: different typologies of public space blend into the wetland ecosystem that constantly transforms the water of the city and of the river. People are invited to appropriate the public space of the city and make it their own.
Medium: landscape architecture/ public competition
Year: 2012
Dimensions: 2 km
Place: Valdivia, Chile
Support: wetland artificial system
SPECIFICATIONS
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Creating a temporal space of interaction between different people responds to an interest towards collectivity and spontaneity. Creation is sometimes the result of a moment or a coincidence of circumstances between mutual interests. Collective work can be the motor of large scale public projects. Many individualities together form multiplicity. The assortment of projects presented here is varied in shape and kind. They have their origin in the collective and independent ambitions of generating alternative projects from scratch and in the belief for trans-disciplinary practice as a powerful medium. Here, intentions prove to be strong enough to turn into exchanging and learning platforms.
CHAPTER 3
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19. INSTALLATION IN PUBLIC SPACE LAB
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The laboratory is a project executed less than a month ago but conceived about a year ago. This exchange platform proposed to bring two subjects of discussion to a space of collective creation: public space and artistic installation. For 3 weeks, 30 people from different backgrounds and fields of studies developed 4 collective proposals for installation projects. The workshop had special guests that each day addressed a subject of relation to the laboratory. At the end of the workshop process, the groups installed their projects in public space. The entire project never seized to be an experiment but the results of the laboratory went beyond any expectations. This is the first version of this project that raised questions about the relation of the public space of Bogota and how it could grow closer to their inhabitants.
Medium: production and organization/workshop and public installation exhibition/ project realized with the architecture collective Posiciones de Emergencia, winner of the National Competition: Laboratorios 2011, of El Banco de la Republica and the Gilberto Alzate Avendaño Foundation.
Year: 2012
Dimensions: 30 people, 3 weeks, 4 installation projects
Place: El Parqueadero, Banco de la Republica Contemporary Art Museum,Bogota, Colombia
Support: room, benches, tables, people, public space, diverse kind of materials
SPECIFICATIONS
20. S-M.A.O MODEL WORKSHOP AND EXHIBITION
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The work of the Spanish architecture studio S.M.A.O. has its origin in a plastic exploration for geometries and materials. We invited the architects to Bogota and based on their projects, created a space to use models as exploration mediums of their work.
Medium: production and organization of the workshop of models of the projects of Architecture studio S.M.A.O. from Spain / project realized with the architecture collective Posiciones de Emergencia
Year: 2010
Dimensions: 20 people, 4 models, 1 week
Place: Bogota, Colombia
Support: room, tables, chairs, people, card board, glue, cutting blades.
SPECIFICATIONS
21. BOGOTA FLOODING WORKSHOP
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In 2011, Colombia went through the worst winter crisis of its history: During several months, the incessant rain devastated towns all over the country. Thousands of people were affected and hundreds of questions about what to do were raised. This workshop was proposed to discuss this natural phenomenon that doesn’t seem to be stopping and that is changing the way we conceive the world and our relation with nature and climate. As special guests, we invited the architecture collective from Ecuador, Al Borde.
Medium: production and organization of flooding workshop with Ecuadorian Architects guests, AlBorde / project realized with the architecture collective Posiciones de Emergencia
Year: 2011
Dimensions: 17 people
Place: Bogota, Colombia
Support: room, tables, chairs, people
SPECIFICATIONS
22. BR +/-
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Wallace Masuko is a young Brazilian artist who had developed a thesis work on Du-champ and ready-made production. We invited him to Colombia and together, we produced a workshop of 1 week in which different people participated by showing their portfolios and sharing a discussion space. This was my first experience of organizing a workshop. Wallace was very happy and stayed in Colombia for 2 months.
Medium: production and organization of the workshop with a guest artist from Brazil, Wallace Masuko / project realized with the art collective Trata de Artistas
Year: 2010
Dimensions: 10 people, 1 week
Place: Bogota, Colombia
Support: a room, slide projector, Brazilian artist, people
SPECIFICATIONS
23. ALFREDO ROMAN RESIDENCY PROJECT
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The project for creating an artistic residency started with the intentions of establishing interchange connections with other artists in different parts of the world. This project was possible through the support of international organization Residencias en Red (Iberoamerica). Alfredo developed a video installation project during his time in Bogota.
Medium: residency project produced and managed in association with the art exhibition space La Agencia, in Bogota. The selected resident: a Bolivian artist, Alfredo Roman.
Year: 2011
Dimensions: 1 artist, 2 months of residency
Place: Bogota, Colombia
Support: two countries, a project
SPECIFICATIONS
24.RESTREPORAMA
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Carlos E. Restrepo Park is located in one of Bogota’s most traditional commercial neighborhoods, El Rest repo. The neighborhood is characterized for its high density of population during the weekdays, and the use that homeless people make of public areas as domestic facilities. All of this has deteriorated the neighborhood. RESTREPORAMA is a winning project of a district competition called Love for Bogota. The project proposes the improvement and recuperation of the public park Carlos E. Restrepo, through mechanisms of socialization and community interaction. During 3 months, design campaigns that gave people information about their park, that pointed its problems and that proposed new approaches to public space through cultural devices, were developed in a collective group of 9 people of different disciplinary fields. RESTREPORAMA concluded with a huge art installation built between the collective organizer and the neighbors of El Restrepo.
Medium: installation/information design: project for the recuperation of public space through methods of socialization and community creation.
Year: 2011
Dimensions: 4830m2
Place: Bogota, Colombia
Support: Carlos E. Restrepo Public Park, El Restrepo neighborhood, Bogota
SPECIFICATIONS
25.LES ATELIERS
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Medium: international workshop/selected participant/30 people from different places and backgrounds working together for 5 weeks in Paris/staging and revealing the landscape of the Paris Region
Year: 2012
Dimensions: 5 weeksPlace: Paris, France
Support: Les Ateliers, non-govern-mental organization dedicated to the study of landscape
SPECIFICATIONS
On august 2012 thirty people from different parts of the world were selected to participate in a 5 week workshop in the city of Paris. The aim of the workshop was to stage and reveal the landscape of the region of L’Isle de France. The project developed during this workshop focused on the opportunities of development hidden on the over and underground landscape of the region, approached topographically, historically, economically and socially. During these 5 weeks an exploration process that included creation of models, drawings, illustrations and videos among other media, concluded with the exposition of the project to the local community.
Editorial projects: some, still in process.
CHAPTER 4
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26. EL JARILLON
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The flooding workshop resulted in the publication of a handmade fanzine that compiled the doubts and ideas that a group of 20 people had about the flooding emergency in Colombia in drawings, images, sentences and annotations. We published 99 editions and sold out on the first night.
Medium: illustration/writing/edition of the fanzine / collective work with the participants of the flooding workshop and that were self-named Los Hidrologicos / project realized with the architecture collective Posiciones de Emergencia
Year: 2011
Dimensions: 99 booklet editions
Place: Bogota, Colombia
Support: paper, ink, photocopies
SPECIFICATIONS
A project for an album book for children about the secret life of the hills. The book uses images as a narrative resource and onomatopoeias for short texts that accompany the illustrations. The narrative of the book is about a boy that goes up the hills of Bogota. Through scale alteration the boy merges with the environment, which changes according to the altitude of the mountain.
Medium: illustration/writing
Year: 2011
Dimensions: 20 pages of 20 x 10 cm
Place: Bogota, Colombia
Support: paper, ink, digital color.
SPECIFICATIONS
27. TOWARDS THE HILL
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28. BOGOTA HILLS BIRD GUIDE
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A project of illustration and design of a portable bird-observation-guide composed of 20 different postcards of bird species from the hills of Bogota. The illustrations and the design of the postcards are accompanied by the information gathered in collaboration with a biologist. The postcards do not resemble other bird observation guides; its character is more informal and is intended for amateur bird lovers who seek alternative methods of observation than those exclusively scientific.
Medium: Illustration and design
Year: 2012
Dimensions: 20 postcards of 20 different bird species
Place: Bogota, Colombia
Support: paper, ink, digital design
SPECIFICATIONS
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Bogota, Colombia
2012