Promenade

The experience of walking in the work of art has been a long-standing topic for artists, and one in constant evolution. Beginning with the proximity between painting and the urban setting brought about by Impressionism in the late- 19th century, and extending through to the Land Art works of the 1970s that were created directly in the landscape, art has posed different ways to extrapolate the frontal, unilateral, passive and optical apprehension of the artwork. Promenade (2007) is a non-material work of art that, however, offers the spectator an experience of immersion and motion. This work made up of several loudspeakers that emit the sounds of a tropical storm reveals itself to visitors as they slowly amble in the exhibition room, on a sensation-filled stroll that is totally abstracted from the exterior. Gonzalez-Foerster is keen on notions such as cultural nomadism and tropicalization as they are found in the psychogeographic elements of a given place. In her installations, films and multimedia projects, the artist works with the spectator’s perception: “The unforeseen is what actually matters to me, rather than the programmed. To this end, we need to start out from a renunciation,” she has said.