MIAMI PHOTOGRAPHIC OBSERVATORY OPENED WITH ARTIST RAMÓN WILLIAMS

The Miami Photographic Observatory (MPhO) is a project conceived and directed by Aluna Art Foundation. It opened its doors at Tower Art Space as an artist residency and platform dedicated to studying the urban evolution and current configuration of Miami’s vital spaces through photographic imagery. Local and international photographers, filmmakers, and visual artists will have access to a studio/gallery space where they can develop commissioned projects curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective. Throughout their stay, artists will also have the opportunity to exhibit previous works alongside visual outcomes created during their residency.

Ramón Williams is MPhO’s inaugural invited artist. The Observatory initially exhibited a selection of images from his Trace Crop Off series, a unique documentation of the city begun upon his arrival in 1996. He has documented Miami through an unembellished poetic approach that conceptually decodes and recodes the keys to the city’s contradictory nature. Avoiding idyllic natural paradises and the seductive stereotypes of luxury and fame commonly associated with Miami, Williams’ incisive lens captures the layers beneath its urban epidermis.

As Baudrillard writes in America, cultural experience in this country stems from life itself staged as a continuous performance. Miami is one of the cities bound to spectacle, to the paradise of artifice. Williams’ artistic practice deconstructs this vision. Through photographic chronicles of organic scenes, he’s stumbled upon, he employs relentless humor to portray the intervals within the city’s ongoing spectacle. In doing so, he reveals the authentic Miami beneath its glamorous façade with a witty gaze that provokes reflection. In his continuous drift through the city, consistently countering the spectacle, he seeks—as a faithful disciple of Guy Debord and Joseph Kosuth—the precise instant when letters fade and sharp conceptual language games arise.

Williams’s inaugural exhibition displayed the way in which he mapped the city with a compositional sharpness that captures urban gaps, contradictions, the discovery of verbal and visual puns, and the intrusion of alternative meanings within found kitsch. Ultimately, his photographs simultaneously function as hypertexts connected to the broader history of American abstraction and as an exercise in cultural critique.

For the final exhibition of his residency, Williams created an alternate documentation using drones to capture Little Havana’s green spaces. The statement accompanying the series reads:
“At the beginning, there was the swamp and its alligators, native peoples and their conquerors, then Black communities, Jewish immigrants, Hispanic diasporas, the mafia and skyscrapers, artists and galleries, yuppies and their parents, investors and realtors, schemes and drawings, bulldozers and steamrollers, cranes and Airbnbs. Each green stretch of land surrendered to ungentle gentrification tightens to the binary pulse of the global stock exchange, in the midst of a future that confesses it has already gone by, though we still refuse to believe it. Last Green Patches is a forensic document written ahead of its time, conceived and carried out within the grounds of the MPhO. Archives lodged in the future of such a past-to-come promise to guard and to share this aerial testimonial vision of greenery in extinction, invoiced in the name of progress—or at least in the euphoric urban sprawl of one of its iconic enclaves: Calle Ocho in Little Havana”.

In the coming months, MPho will present a continuous program featuring invited residents such as Lili (Ana), Geandy Pavón, Juan Carlos Alom, and Elisa Benedetti, each developing unique visualities connected with Miami’s incessant transformation. Together, these practices will contribute to the construction of a body of knowledge of Miami that—following the Foucauldian sense of the archive, not merely a collection of documents but the system that governs what can be remembered—will function as an alternative urban archive of the city instigating a dialogue about its present and future.

MPhO is on view at Aluna Art Foundation, 1444 SW 7 St, Miami, Fl 33135 (United States).