'Looper'
Billboard
3m x 6m
located at Piazza San Carlo, Torino, Italia
November 2003-February 2004
Commissioned by ManifesTO

It shows an image of Stockholm at night found reproduced in a travel book about Sweden published in 1961. I placed this image together with its mirror doubles (think of the mirroring of 'better scenery') so it looks like a kaleidoscopic image showing an impossible city. It's very difficult to look at it without getting lost in its loops and symmetry. And right in the centre all these images converge in a kind of terrible cross-roads. So as an image you are being transported in loops...visually in the patterns but also in terms of time.
And then the text describes this convention or assembly of 'the most perceptive' taking place in a small bar in Haiti: Somewhere totally 'other' than both Stockholm or the location of the billboard in Torino, Italy. (If anyone researches the town of Jérémie in Haiti: it's now very isolated and depressed - it used to be big thriving port but in 1964 Papa Doc's Tontons Macoute massacred many of the mulattos there and it's never recovered. So, it has a horror attached to it).Then too is the association of Haiti with Voodoo and there is the strange psychedelic kaleidoscope of the image of Stockholm, and at its absolute centre is the motif of the crossroads, the location where the Haitian demon of death, Baron Samedi is found.
And who is this group of 'most perceptive people' ( cf: other works Meetings. Reunion-Salo, the God-look-alikes, etc : all people with an odd/special gift for something visual?) Are we one of them if we look at this poster? Is the text talking about its own audience?
So, it is full of contradictions, enigmas and ambiguities; the image is of the city of Stockholm but is placed in an Italian city yet describes a meeting in Haiti. But then we are meant to be global citizens. As always I seem to be putting the wrong thing in the wrong place. A bringing together of things that shouldn't be together.
And of course it is an advertisement: ridiculously using Art as an absurd opportunity to place an advert in a prime location at the centre of Torino for a tiny hotel in the middle of nowhere in Haiti.

Adam Chodzko in conversation with Simone Scarletti