Many things around the landscape interest me, the most intriguing is how the landscape is a construct, an idea, as geographer D.W. Meining would put it better “Any landscape is composed not only of what lies before your eyes, but what lies within our heads”.
It’s hard to define the landscape, it can be so many things but still there are some visuals that remain constant, the natural objects, such as plants or hills, the artifacts like farms or windmills and the technical installations such as docks or metal wires. The landscape is just an abstraction of these things, we go through the creative act of filtering and learn to recognize the landscape: it’s all about perception.
We are still dreaming of looking for the ideal landscape, this intact image that does not exist anymore. Everything has been discovered, colonized, walked, feeding on the idea of appropriating nature. The Anthroposcenic landscape has become the new normal, it’s hard to distinguish between the altered and “natural” state.
I have built my own landscape, filtering and curating while walking across Anthroposcenic environments. Reflecting on how I can break the idea of a single “image”, gathering different fragments that I encounter.
This project is a manifest of the absence of the ideal landscape, where everything has already been shaped by humans. Terra Cognita is an installation where I share my walking memories, inviting the audience to wander around and interact with these familiar grounds.
Meinig, D. W. (1976). The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene. Landscape Architecture, 66(1), 47–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44664125
The work is a series of sculptures, that give a physical form to a variety of pessimistic inner voices stemming from deep within the subconscious. The beings feed on the feelings of fear, insecurity, frustration, self-doubt and uncertainty. They speak through their synthesized voices, craving for attention and validation, constantly reminding of their existence.
This work was a means to make sense of my own lived experience with a dissociative disorder. Along the way I found out that wholes are not necessarily ones, and that more important than unified fronts are the dialogues in-betweens. Sense of connection creates a sense of common ground, a safe space for change and growth.
The end result is “one” sculpture made of numerous separate parts, coming together to form a whole, held together by their connect.
This work explores the moment of change. What happens when something comes to a point of its life cycle, where it ceases to be what it was? At that moment, old structures get dismantled and its substance splits into a countless number of particles. These particles then travel where they are taken to, and become a part of something else.
