Atlas Remoto:
Pre-Arrival Image – 2026 / Ongoing

Two-channel video installation with sound and photographic series
2 synchronized Full HD videos, color, stereo sound (continuous loop)
2 simultaneous projections onto both sides of a single suspended screen
2 pigment prints on Hahnemühle paper, 90 × 120 cm each
Edition: 3 + 2 A.P.

Atlas Remoto is an artistic research project that investigates how different image regimes shape our relationship with a territory. It starts from a simple premise: we rarely encounter a place for the first time. Before we arrive, territories already exist as images circulating through photographs, archives, maps, translations, digital platforms, simulations, and algorithmic image-generation systems.

The first chapter, Pre-Arrival Image (2026), was developed in the context of the VIIAF International Image Art Festival in Chengdu, China, in collaboration with students from Chengdu College of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

The project emerged from a specific question: what do we really know about a place before inhabiting it?

Weeks before travelling, I generated an archive of approximately 450 images through an extended dialogue with artificial intelligence. Rather than faithfully representing Chengdu, this process explored how a city could be constructed through visual associations, projections, and correlations. These were not images produced from memory or direct experience, but of a city that existed solely as an image.

Once in Chengdu, this archive entered into dialogue with the experience of the place. Together with university students, I selected the images they recognized as belonging to their city. At the same time, walks through Chengdu generated new photographs and videos, inevitably shaped by the images that had preceded the journey.

Presented as a two-channel video installation with sound and a photographic diptych, Pre-Arrival Image does not establish an opposition between AI-generated and documentary images. Both participate in the contemporary construction of a place, operating as distinct image regimes that coexist within a single dispositif, questioning the relationship between representation, experience, and territory.

The two sequences are projected simultaneously onto opposite sides of a single suspended screen positioned at the centre of the exhibition space. Each projection presents a different sequence, allowing viewers to access only one at a time, depending on their position, while the other remains outside their field of vision. The installation thus transforms its initial question into a bodily experience: every encounter with a territory is necessarily partial, situated, and mediated by what remains outside the image.