the suspension of disbelief

“The Catholic iconography brought to the US by immigrants from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Cuba is displayed in places where the predominant attitude toward Latino culture is one of amused fascination....The new sense of time and space generated by telecommunications--in the substitution of continuity and distance with instantaneousness and ubiquity--has transformed the perception of things so that they are no longer lived directly but through their representations. Experience is mainly available through signs: things are not lived directly but rather through the agency of a medium, in the consumption of images and objects that replace what they stand for. Such rootlessness accounts for the high volatility and ultimate transferability of culture in postmodern times.” - Celeste Olalquiaga

“In the same contradictory manner that advertisements promote the reality and unreality of a referent, bodies have become the locus of a fierce battle between permanence and evanescence.” 

Isolated place. Obsessive repetition is at the core of the process of simulation.

Advertisements: Perception is bombarded with reality intensive campaigns. If place is a commodity, as desired object for fast commerce. To what extent does this shape our collective identification of a place? Does it affect the native just as well as the outsider?

Is psychestenia a defense mechanism?