Ambiguous Skate Nation

Ambiguous Skate Nation
2022
Installation, stickers
Variable dimensions                


Around 200 handcut stickers are made available to the visitors to be glued on the gallery wall. A web-looking network naturally starts to form as the visitors enter and contribute to a collective collage of a continuously growing image bank.

Accumulated pictures, logos of existing brands, YouTube comments screenshots, made up slogans and modified found imagery found online and in archives showcase a humourous and dark side of skateboarding where, its history, visual identity relate to gender, sexuality and self-expression shifts to a new momentum made possible by the non-traditional skateboarders and queer skateboarding communities.

The sticker as a medium has always been rooted in the history of skateboarding and other anarchist or revolutionary subcultures. In this installation, YLÏAM makes use of this medium to involve the viewer in playful way to display powerful and humourous messages that first seem to be small of scale, but grow bigger when time passes.