New hypothesis for Baucis (2021)

The starting point of the work is Italo Calvino's description of the city of Baucis (Calvino, 1972). In a city held high, where nothing touches the earth except its shadows, the inhabitants now look from afar and long in the absence of a land that existed before their memory. The work proposes to shed light on the anthropocenic relationship between the earth and the making of a city vis-à-vis the dichotomy of thought and matter. Through the temporal projection of analog photographs of a man-altered landscape (Jänschewalde) and its alienated, infrastructural earth onto a mirrored surface, a liquid landscape unfolds with the visitors as inhabitants. The speed of transition between the projected images is influenced by the soundscape of the construction sites surrounding the exhibition space.

The projected photographs are part of research on infrastructural sites, open pit mines and places of material extraction (see Inspecting Material Unconsciousness, 2019). The series investigates such sites as sites of a social collective unconscious in the making, where matters that our consciousness prefers not to inspect become landscapes. The photographic endeavor unfolds the eeriness of the mine's vast altered landscapes to the point of unrecognizability, visually exposing the extractive wounds of capitalism on Earth as a side effect of a habit of mind.