“Landscape of Wires”

A map of lines drawn overhead, a landscape of wires power the city. Hanging on every post, crossing the sky, dangling in loops, it is a metaphor for entangled lives. The string of low and high voltage utilities, enabling telecommunication and internet connections, make up paragraphs of society’s virtual proximity, physical distance, and emotional disconnection. Life’s inequalities are told in stark contrast of the density of wires in one location to the next.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series co-sponsored by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) presents “Landscape of Wires”, an artist talk by Annie Pacaña – a faculty at the UP College of Fine Arts. It is happening on 21 February (Friday) at 5:30PM via Zoom. The talk is in conjunction with Assistant Professor Pacaña’s on-going exhibit, ‘Live Wire’, which runs from 14 February to 2 March 2025 at the NO Community-run Space (45 Matimtiman St., Teachers Village East, Diliman QuezonCity). It is also Geography’s contribution to the National Arts Month (February).

While ‘Live Wire’ celebrates the ephemeral yet embedded-in-life architecture that choreographs the linear entanglements of exigent wires interspersing Metro Manila’s landscape, the talk is a continuation of Pacaña’s earlier work ‘Linescapes’. With theoretical inspirations that range from Guy Debord and Michel de Certeau to Kevin Lynch and Rob Kitchin, Live Wire’s genealogical similarity with ‘Linescapes’ acknowledges various creative geographies as glimpsed from walking-in-the-city, psychogeography, flânerie, gestalt and countercartography. Like other artist-cartographer who engages with creative spatialities, Pacaña’s talk discusses a landscape of urban wires that traverse the city that mimetically parallel random intersecting lives of individuals and collectives. Or as Pacaña claims: The city has become more legible in this alternate way of mapping urban experience (Pacaña, 2019, Creating Spaces of Contemplation from the City’s Chaos through Linescapes).

Annie Dennise Pacaña is a visual artist who contemplates urban experience, applying countermapping strategies in creating memory maps from the visual chaos of Metro Manila. She utilizes digital vector line drawings (linescapes), and photographic abstraction of urban forms (kaleidoscapes) to process and reimagine her experiences as she moves about the city. She creates photography-based, digitally-processed prints, collages, and moving image works translated into both outdoor and indoor immersive projections, TV display installation, and reflected and refracted light projection on found objects (car window and windshields).

As a curator, she started ‘Matereality’ in 2022, an exhibition platform for works exploring one’s lived experience through varying material explorations of artists who are mothers. In 2023, Pacaña initiated Sound Visuals (now on its fifth iteration), a platform to experience the intersection and exchange of moving image, music/sound art, and dance.

With a background in graphic design, Pacaña began her artistic practice with her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. Her works explore psychogeography, investigating the city as the self while connecting with others thru transdisciplinary collaborations with other visual artists, contemporary dance choreographers, and sound artists/musicians. Pacaña is currently an assistant professor at the College of Fine Arts, and a director of the Office of Community Relations at the University of the Philippines (Diliman).

Pacaña is also involved in Art Fair Philippines 2025 which runs from 21-23 February 2025 at Tower Two | Booth 51, Ayala Triangle, Makati City. Core Contemporary Art presents Cross Currents at Art Fair Philippines 2025, a dynamic cross-cultural exchange between artists from Malaysia and Philippines. Within this framework, also discover an accompanying salon-style presentation, Surround Me With All The Beautiful Things, which delve into the human desire for beauty, examining how it shapes our perceptions, emotions, and connections with the world.
As in previous iterations, the Heo/Geo Lecture Series aims to bring various geography practitioners in the academy, civil society, industry and community to share their geography-informed practices that operate in multiple scales. This lecture is facilitated by the Media, Literary Geographies, and Geohumanities (MELANGE) research group of the UP Department of Geography. It also satisfies the Social Development Goals #4 (Quality Education) and #15 (Life on Land) of the United Nations Sustainable Development.

To participate in our Lecture Series, please register through this link or simply paste this to your URL: https://tinyurl.com/2yvufaey

Source: UP Department of Geography Facebook