Bunker for a Tropical Pixel

Tatyana Zambrano makes the octopus the protagonist of her research around the hyper-tropicalization of water adventure parks in Europe. During her residency in Germany, she conducted research about tropical pixels transformation in video games. In this way, she analyzes the history of these images in video games according to their landscape aesthetics, their representation and their quality. In the digital realm, Latin America becomes a spatially modelled and stereotyped territory where the narrative is contextualized as consumption landscapes that are the simultaneous spatial, cultural, and historical constructions that give meaning to a narrative and represent an augmented reality of cities. They are extensive, immersive, and suggestive, but can also be perverse, as Claudio Rossi writes.

The image of the tropics has always been fascinating for Europeans. They have sought to reshape the Latin American tropics according to their own needs and interests, conceiving the equatorial belt of the world as a colonial supplementary space.

This fetishization continues. However, instead of being confined to the equator, this fantasy is being simulated in adventure parks in the northern hemisphere. As Paolo Bianchi summarizes: “The tropics are everywhere. They even compete with the actual tropics.” 

By stretching the image of the tropics into the digital realm, Tatyana gives insights into post-tropical ego-existentialism and its implications for our relationship with the tropics in times of climate collapse. The exhibition provides a humorous and dark scenario of the possibility of building one’s digital bunker that is not tied to a country or culture. It can be cultivated and marketed across firewalls as a sensual tropical attitude to life, isolated from doubts and crises. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg started to build an underground bunker on Kauai, profiting from the county’s offering to give residents a tax break for building safe rooms. Could this also apply for adventure parks that are bunkers of illusions? Actually, as every illusion has loopholes, in this case the space between the pixel bunkers are voids, data that is supposed to remain encrypted by big companies.

Text by Beatrice Zaidenberg