The CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival is closing this weekend, but the nature of the festival (mini-exhibits all over town) suggests that it’s worth a stop or two before the end. A good spot to check out is the Stephen Bulger Gallery and Camera for “Off World,” a 24-hour-a-day exhibit by Mateo Guez. The glass wall facing CAMH on Queen Street is dotted with Motorola phones, each running clips of footage shot by Guez in the Smoky Mountain slum, outside of Manila in the Philippines, on a Motorola Z10 mobile phone.
Kids play basketball and shovel garbage in a giant, lively slum, where miles of waste serves as grass, smiling and vamping for Guez and his videophone in an easy, playful way. The familiar cellphone and its ubiquity provoke a different response than still photography might. (The CONTACT website, perhaps overdoing it, suggests that the phone acts “as an extension of his body.”) The constant shock of poverty and degradation is usually well-served by photography, and while the medium here is in no way as affecting or beautiful as it might be, the ultimate worthlessness of throwaway first-world technology capturing this kind of horror offers its own kind of statement. When a little guy wordlessly throws up his arms in some kind of sporting triumph during a break from working the waste heap, the moment is caught by someone and something that’s really with the subject in an understood, average way.
The low-tech cell footage is stilted, nearly stop-motion, and the quality of the video is emphasized by the low, methane-gray haze of pollution and the tall ships of garbage that frame every phone’s screen. The presentation demands that the viewer get close to the tiny screen to see the clips play out, brilliantly framed by the shitty Motorolas.
“Off World” is described, on the wall, as “immaterial,” and the work and the gallery (designed by Andrew Mallis) “exist in the intimate, yet social, spaces now extended by mobile media.” See it IRL or at http://offworld.bulgergallery.com.