Inspecting material unconsciousness

Artistic research project, artworks:

Before the water came, 2020
15 digital b/w photographs (series)

New hypothesis for Baucis, 2022
Mixed-media installation
Photographs, slide projector, electronics, text, mirror, steel

The series Before the water came consists of photographs taken at open pit mine of Jänschewalde in the outskirts of Berlin. The series investigates the open pit mine as a site of a societal 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 non-recognition, visually exposing the extractive wounds of capitalism on Earth as a side effect of a habit of mind.

Portraying the previous photographs, the installation New hypothesis for Baucis imagines the city of Baucis (Calvino, 1972) in contemporary transmediation. 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 anthroposcenic 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 and its alienated, infrastructural earth onto a mirrored surface, a liquid landscape unfolds with the visitors as inhabitants.