KANTUTA QUIROS & ALIOCHA IMHOff - Overlapping Biennial

“CCTeVezi” (2008)
C-type print, 40 x 50 cm
courtesy of the artist
The project “CCTeVezi” was created in 2008 in Timişoara,
when closed-circuit television surveillance cameras began to
be increasingly present in the Romanian public space, thus
creating a feeling of either security or paranoia depending on
one’s personal experiences and the way one relates to the
idea of security/authority.
The project is an ongoing work-in-progress that can be deployed
in any public space.
The camera or, better said, the eye behind it, simultaneously
assumes its need for voyeurism and for controlling the
surrounding reality. For how should we define public surveillance,
if not as a mixture of voyeurism and control?
Unlike its sister – the surveillance camera – the photo or the
video camera undermines its own role, primarily through the
location it chooses to monitor and which makes it, just as
easily, a virtual target of another surveillance system or of
another voyeur.
The concept of surveillance system is in its turn undermined
by the futility of the gesture. The final goal of the voyeur
behind the camera is to unveil himself, like in the images on
candid camera when one points to the one who is filming. (…)
Maria Luiza Alecsandru
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