The idea for The Smoked Mirror takes both from a long tradition
of founded and unfounded parallelism drawn between India and Mexico
by a number of artists and intellectuals, and from my personal
experience in navigating cities and crowds that seems both strangely
familiar to the senses and utterly cryptic in their motivations
and inner workings. In between one can find a buffer zone of possible
interpretation: taking advantage of the part of the mind that
is still halfway down the road to Delhi (and which will probably
never make it here) one can picture oneself in front of it all
in a tongue-in-cheek yogic exercise. This döppelganger in
India, being simultaneously here and thousands of miles away depending
on the perspective one takes, embodies the unreal status of the
distance traveled, together with the human need to be actually
there, regardless of the possibilities of dematerialized presence
trumpeted by satellite communications, telepresence gurus and
other IT fads.
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