Miguel Palma's response

Lisboa - Roterdam, 2001 from Miguel Palma on Vimeo.

Miguel Palma's lecture was interesting. There wasn't really a question and answer part of the lecture so I wasn't able to ask anything. He had a lot of work to show and part of this lecture wasn't working on the computer so that was added confusion to the "language" barrier. Palma is an artist from Portugal and he lives in Lisbon and New York City. His English wasn't bad at all but there were different questions that the audience was asking and he responded rather obviously. He didn't go into a lot of artist, interesting ideas behind the work, just baseline, obvious situations. Although he didn’t answer many questions in depth there were other things that he said that spoke to me.

“My work is about low-budget special effects.” Palma said this about his project “Lisbon-Rotterdam” where Palma added a trailer to the back of his truck and drove from Lisbon to Rotterdam. On the trailer was a tiny made up city and a pool of water at one end. There was also a video camera capturing the contents of the trailer during the ride. In the end he displayed the trailer and the video. The video shows the town getting destroyed by the water or “waves” crashing in on their town. The plastic people and houses get covered by the water and it is to replicate a natural disaster. I love the low budget special effects idea behind his work. Miguel Palma makes many models and also larger scale installations. I enjoyed this piece the most for the miniature feel and just using everyday situation like driving your car and creating it into a disaster like ruining a town. There is a certain drama in the piece but also a silliness that I want to portray in my own work.

Three words I would use to describe Palma’s work: Transportation, Technology, pollution

I like that his work wasn’t immediately political and in fact some works weren’t at all. However, some works had political ideas behind them like how people pollute the earth (Ecosystem 1995, 360° 2008). The works are about pollution and how people are slowly destroying the earth. I like them because the message is subtle. There is more depth than just saying “don’t pollute.” It allows you to think about how you are polluting every day.