Places that do not exist (GoggleEarth 1.0)

The proposed project, work of the artists Isaki Lacuesta and Isa Campo, consists of a series of portraits and filmings of real spaces hidden by Google Earth because they are protected places (military installations, training camps, governmental buildings, nudist beaches and so on) in Spain, Colombia, Ecuador and Russia for example, or which have been radically altered because of property speculation. The two creators of the piece visited the places which had, in theory, ‘disappeared’ from the map, to film the real experience of the places. As such they have prepared several photographs and films intended to reclaim the need for the continued provision of a human vision of our world, at ground level,  to recover this first hand vision, without false intermediaries.

The artists came up with this project upon discovering that one of the landscapes where they had spent a lot of time over the last few years (the main location of the film La leyenda del tiempo), a protected natural park, next to the Casería Beach, on San Fernando (Cádiz, Spain), did not appear on Google Earth. In its place could only be seen a false wasteground, of a light brown colour.