Carlos Ruiz-Valarino | Puerto Rico

“Hosts and Guests” 2004 and “No More Guests” 2005

Tourism as a contemporary phenomenon occurs when leisure time, disposable income, and an ethnic or historic journey occur simultaneously. In this sense we can consider tourism as a phenomenon that generates short-term fantasies in which individuals (tourists) are converted into transgressive agents that divide the local from the global. The tourist becomes a visiting agent who delegitimizes the existence of the native and national in the context of a global society.

This series of videos proposes problematizing the barriers that separate local and global realities. The introduction of the tourist/visitor character permits me to develop links to contemporary society, where the defining social elements are in constant cultural agitation. This instability is due not only to the North American presence in various aspects of Puerto Rican life but also to the masses of North American and European tourists who week by week invade the colonial Puerto Rican landscape.

This project proposes an anthropological approach to the circumstances that dominate contemporary Puerto Rican reality. The ideology of the native and the local has historically dominated the discourse of identity, framing the idea of the foreigner or tourist as a transgressive element in the social and political realities of Puerto Rican society.
Through this series I aspire to critically address objectivity in media of mass production such as photography and video, in the era of digital manipulation and indiscriminate assembling of discreet image fragments. This strategy is not only focused on the correspondence between reality and representation but is a form of tackling identity as a visual fiction. Thus the use of the computer in the context of contemporary video art promotes a reconstructive aesthetic, biotechnology and digital engineering, and flexible and malleable identities. These permit the possibility of changing a face or a body for another as though one was changing clothes.