“The Mission from the moment we are born, the most important preoccupation we undertake—other than avoiding death itself—is an incessant search for Identity. The 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 are explored, we always seem to return to the very same place we have always known, the very same point of departure.”
— Sergio Duran
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An Embassy Without a Country is a series of installation works engrossed in the fundamental issue of "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, social groups, and our race or our nation.
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THE EMBASSIES
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 origins, all too often taken for granted or simply accepted as prepackaged, effortlessly consumable formulae.
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 derived from 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.