Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte – After Ruscha (2011)

Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte- After Ruscha takes as its inspiration Edward Ruscha’s photo book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) in which he photographed four kilometers of the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles with a motorized camera mounted on the back of a truck. This two-channel video installation uses a continuous tracking shot that takes inventory of a quotidian Bolivian landscape. It documents and simultaneously recreates the Avenida Alfonso Ugarte: a major thoroughfare in El Alto, a satellite city of La Paz which is one of the largest urban centers and fastest growing in Bolivia and, also, one of the sites where violent protests related to the Bolivian gas conflict in October 2003 took place. In a 26-minute long take, Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte juxtaposes the mundane with social conflict inserting one single still scene of violence into the register of the typical scenery of daily Bolivian life, thus capturing the variegated reality of El Alto, and, by extension, that of developing countries. <<Click here for still images>>