SEARCH STRATEGY
Google Earth has established itself as one of the main contemporary interfaces for accessing territory. The system combines search functions, cartographic visualization, and satellite imagery, allowing users to virtually navigate almost any point on the planet. In older versions of the program, roughly between 2008 and 2014, searching for “Palestina” revealed an anomaly marked by bias: due to the absence of coordinates associated with the name, the location marker automatically shifted to “Null Island,” the point at 0° latitude and 0° longitude in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The program recognized no territory for “Palestina,” yet, in contrast, readily identified several homonymous towns scattered across Latin America, from southern Argentina to northern Guatemala.
Estrategia de búsqueda arises from this discrepancy.
Estrada produces a series of postcards based on satellite captures of Brazilian Palestinas and, among them, a singular postcard in which historical Palestine appears as an impossible point, cast into the sea by the logic of the U.S.-based platform.
By gathering and circulating these images, the work activates a broader investigation into the founding processes of these towns, the migratory flows that occupied these territories, and the imaginaries projected through the idea of a “promised land” - layers that persist as a silent backdrop to the series’ visual operation. The postcard, a medium of circulation par excellence, becomes in Estrategia de búsqueda a vehicle through which a word and its imagined territories travel, operating within the instability between coordinates and erasures.
