Sergio Duran
April 19, 1999

AN EMBASSY WITHOUT A COUNTRY

"The 'individual,' a process rather than an entity, ever becoming one thing after another and never stopping to be any one of its transient aspects, is like Heracleitus' river into which you can never step a second time." From the moment we are born, the most important singular preoccupation we undertake, other than avoiding death itself, is an incessant search for Identity. An obsession for knowing who we are, ephemeral even to the most self assured, is a never-ending scenario in which no single character is safe or sane and whatever paths we explore, we always seem to return to the very same place we have always known, the very same point of departure.

Prototype borderline writing apparatus

An Embassy With out a Country is a series of installation works engrossed in the fundamental question of Provenance, Authenticity and Identity, and is concerned with the bulwarks of resistance that we build in order to guard against the threat posed to the feeble construct of what we know as our persona. It re-examines the way we choose to distinguish ourselves from others, whether in the context of our immediate family, our clubs and social groups, our race or our nation.

The Embassies, as these works are entitled, take their name from the signifier referring to the envoy; a representative or a group of representatives with a message to deliver. The word Embassy originally refers to the word ambaht, meaning a service. As such, the concept of the Embassy is an entirely amorphous body of notions and takes a physical form only in its contemporary definition.

Conceptually, "Embassies" would be received and recognized by the host authority, which in return would send an equivalent "Embassy" to the corresponding country. In their primal form, these embassies are a series of mutually accorded privileges and commonly subscribed rituals accentuated by a succession of icons, symbols, emblems and other paraphernalia that with a certain artificiality, if not altogether a doubtful authority, are created for the specific purpose of lending credibility to the events and persons involved. A fragile credibility that if taken out of context would risk being mistaken for a farce, indeed the essence of humor. These installations are about the masks, tools, aids, crutches and other paraphernalia that we use and carry with us in order to find ourselves and to make ourselves known or heard in the chaos of the contemporary psyche. The Embassies are about the clans, gangs, clubs and social groups we join and the rituals of identification that we create in order to find some form of security in the guise of customs, culture and Art. Not to be confused with a utopian ideal of a borderless or nationless global fantasy, these Embassies propose nothing more than the re-evaluation of the notions of identity and their origin, all too often taken for granted or simply accepted as prepackaged, effortlessly consumable formula. The Embassies describe identity as the area in our lives that defines us and yet remains elusively disguised from ourselves. Not unlike personality and behavioral traits themselves, these Installations are site specific and adopt characteristics that comment on the peculiarities of a distinct site. In doing so, the embassies address specific audiences in the appropriate language given their location in Space and Time. Taking the form of Embassies, these installations question the smug state of contemporary art in exhibits that find comfort in the opportunistic posh security of unchallenged groupings and definitions. "French Art Today", "Brazilian Artist" or the so-called "Hispanic Art". As messages sent from another place or time, the Embassies become displaced portraitures of something that they are not. As representations, their objective is simply to communicate.

The Windmill

The Bourreaucrat for An Embassy without a Country

The Bourreaucrat is an installation artwork representing a unique manifestation of An Embassy Without A Country. On this voyage of representation, The Bourreaucrat performs a ritual of writing an official document of authorization known as a certificate of prestige. This attenuated ritual includes elements reminiscent of the ceremonies performed for the bestowal of certificates of authority, the Diploma as related to the diplomatic envoy's power of representation. In its contemporary use as it relates to the authority to become a professional practitioner in a specified field or the capacity granted to declare oneself a member of a social group. The tittle itself is a composite word derived from French word bureaucrat, as an official and the word bourreau, also a French word meaning the executioner or person that carries out the death penalty. Also known as the executor of high works (exécuteur des hautes œvres). The ritual becomes a process performance enacted by the Bourreaucrat for the supposed purpose of status verification and ranking. A somewhat strained if not stressful ceremony challenging the fragile borders between desire, humility and the desperately frustrating. This apparatus, a machine commissioned by the Embassy for the granting of certificates of prestige, has never in fact properly performed the ascribed function for which it was made. As a failed prototype, its work remains strictly symbolic to all but the Ambassador. Unable to appreciate the merits of a consummate Hanko stamping apparatus, the ambassador perseveres in his mission in spite of the humiliation of not being recognized by most officials in his ceremonious role. To rectify this, an assiduous compilation of protocol questionnaires, automated and ordered by the assistant computer, are presented in the interrogation chamber, forming a perpetually growing database of questions derived themselves from the answers given. The apparatus itself, not unlike an insect in appearance or an industrial steel press, at times resembling a microscope, stands guard for inspection and whimsically grants a certificate of prestige on impulse. The act itself is a random cycle of three possible mannerisms accentuated by the rattling sounds of a stamp driving shaft and a breathing machine that is mounted on the apparatus, all of which is underlined by the random animation of a slot-machine like brain and a deliberately threatening and sometimes even violent stamping motion of the shaft that officially stamps the certificate upon request. Ambassador Solo is a person, indeed any person in search of "Identity" who in the process of finding himself from "within", inadvertently catches a glimpse of the same person "without" and can't help but see humor in the process.

Sergio Duran was born in Paris France where he studied Fine Arts at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. In 1985 he graduated from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Santa Monica, after which he worked at the office of Ricardo Legorreta in Los Angeles. In 1986 he left for Japan on a Japanese government grant. In 1989 he received a Masters in Architecture from the University of Tokyo Department of Engineering where he continued as a Ph.D. candidate for another six years. During this time he assisted Fumihiko Maki in design projects and competition entries, after which he was employed as an architect in the office of Yoshio Taniguchi and later at Arata Isozaki & Associates. Under the title of An Embassy without a Country, these projects represent the notions of provenance and identity, which are a long standing theme in Sergio Duran's work and translate into a series of constructions or installation projects otherwise known as Embassies. In both 1992 and 1993 consecutively awarded as a finalist in the Japan Art Scholarship Competition and Exhibiting both times at the Spiral Garden Exhibition Hall. As organizer Sergio Duran has personally lead multi-national teams of American, Austrian, Australian, Colombian, Hungarian, Spanish, Canadian and Japanese. Often in groups of more than 20 professionals including musicians, computer programmers, mathematicians, artists, architects and more, Duran gathers these groups for a series of meetings and sessions to organize the making of each piece that would later come together in the form of sculpture, music, dance, theater or architecture. Not unlike an architectural construction project in its making, and at the very least gathering a great deal of interest. At present, global disputes, dissension and conflict over national borders, racial and economic wars are signs of an age analogous of Sergio Duran's work. Unconvinced of the unsurmountability of these problems, Sergio Duran questions the Nation our Profession and how we look at what we are.

The Bourreaucrat

The Bourreaucrat is an installation artwork representing a unique manifestation of An Embassy Without A Country. On this voyage of representation, The Bourreaucrat performs a ritual of writing an official document of authorization known as a certificate of prestige. This attenuated ritual includes elements reminiscent of the ceremonies performed for the bestowal of certificates of authority, the Diploma as related to the diplomatic envoy's power of representation. In its contemporary use as it relates to the authority to become a professional practitioner in a specified field or the capacity granted to declare oneself a member of a social group. The tittle itself is a composite word derived from French word bureaucrat, as an official and the word bourreau, also a French word meaning the executioner or person that carries out the death penalty. Also known as the executor of high works (exécuteur des hautes œvres). The ritual becomes a process performance enacted by the Bourreaucrat for the supposed purpose of status verification and ranking. A somewhat strained if not stressful ceremony challenging the fragile borders between desire, humility and the desperately frustrating. This apparatus, a machine commissioned by the Embassy for the granting of certificates of prestige, has never in fact properly performed the ascribed function for which it was made. As a failed prototype, its work remains strictly symbolic to all but the Ambassador. Unable to appreciate the merits of a consummate Hanko stamping apparatus, the ambassador perseveres in his mission in spite of the humiliation of not being recognized by most officials in his ceremonious role. To rectify this, an assiduous compilation of protocol questionnaires, automated and ordered by the assistant computer, are presented in the interrogation chamber, forming a perpetually growing database of questions derived themselves from the answers given. The apparatus itself, not unlike an insect in appearance or an industrial steel press, at times resembling a microscope, stands guard for inspection and whimsically grants a certificate of prestige on impulse. The act itself is a random cycle of three possible mannerisms accentuated by the rattling sounds of a stamp driving shaft and a breathing machine that is mounted on the apparatus, all of which is underlined by the random animation of a slot-machine like brain and a deliberately threatening and sometimes even violent stamping motion of the shaft that officially stamps the certificate upon request. Ambassador Solo is a person, indeed any person in search of "Identity" who in the process of finding himself from "within", inadvertently catches a glimpse of the same person "without" and can't help but see humor in the process.

Sergio Duran was born in Paris France where he studied Fine Arts at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. In 1985 he graduated from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Santa Monica, after which he worked at the office of Ricardo Legorreta in Los Angeles. In 1986 he left for Japan on a Japanese government grant. In 1989 he received a Masters in Architecture from the University of Tokyo Department of Engineering where he continued as a Ph.D. candidate for another six years. During this time he assisted Fumihiko Maki in design projects and competition entries, after which he was employed as an architect in the office of Yoshio Taniguchi and later at Arata Isozaki & Associates. Under the title of An Embassy without a Country, these projects represent the notions of provenance and identity, which are a long standing theme in Sergio Duran's work and translate into a series of constructions or installation projects otherwise known as Embassies. In both 1992 and 1993 consecutively awarded as a finalist in the Japan Art Scholarship Competition and Exhibiting both times at the Spiral Garden Exhibition Hall. As organizer Sergio Duran has personally lead multi-national teams of American, Austrian, Australian, Colombian, Hungarian, Spanish, Canadian and Japanese. Often in groups of more than 20 professionals including musicians, computer programmers, mathematicians, artists, architects and more, Duran gathers these groups for a series of meetings and sessions to organize the making of each piece that would later come together in the form of sculpture, music, dance, theater or architecture. Not unlike an architectural construction project in its making, and at the very least gathering a great deal of interest. At present, global disputes, dissension and conflict over national borders, racial and economic wars are signs of an age analogous of Sergio Duran's work. Unconvinced of the unsurmountability of these problems, Sergio Duran questions the Nation our Profession and how we look at what we are.

See Sergio Duran's work on Inter Communications magazine website

The Speaker

All images and illustrations were kindly furnished by Sergio Duran.