SPACE OTHER
Meeting - Metavilla Gallery January 6, 2022
“The landscape is a phenomenon of spatialization of a singular story. In this space all the scales of past time are spatially manifested in the present, from the most remote geological past to the most current events.
Ecumene Ethics, Augustin Berque.
Evoking landscape today means talking about individual perceptions, collective representations, nature, societies, aesthetic contemplation, mastery of territory, psychology and politics.
To study the landscape is to show a certain sense of observation to draw a better representation or representativeness.
Each of us make and unmake landscapes.
In any landscape there are several semantic layers that overlap and that artists know how to bring out: the origin and the deep identity of things. The artists make it possible to bring up these archaic images, those of the childhood of man or of humanity. The landscape before being an aesthetic reality is first of all a human construction, a shared reality.
It is this shared reality that has contributed to the development in my practice of in situ work designed for a specific place such as a landscape or a garden. It is a question of developing a dialogue, new, unexpected connections by working on the history of the chosen environment, the users of the place, the inhabitants and the visitors by a sensitive and open proposal which no longer stands as an imposed element, placed there but a proposal, an invitation or a sharing.
The work in situ, installation or environment, if it only lives, above all, by and for the space in which it is contained, can nevertheless have its own existence and become "exportable" elsewhere to a "non-site" such as Robert Smithson defined it. One does not preclude the other and does not detract from the specificity of the proposal. When instead, the space landscaped by man whether vast or infinite, or limited and closed, it offers the same possibilities for the artist who knows how to bring up from the depths the traces of memory, the personal history and the common history in an unpublished work addressed to all. Abolish borders, eliminate imposed limits, free ourselves from the rules that govern private space to offer everyone a completely different vision of the world that is both more intimate and more common to all.
The garden of all origins is intended above all to be an enclosed space, or at least a circumscribed one, in which the hand of man brings together the natural world, even the wild and civilisation. In an urban environment, this assertion is even more true because by bringing nature into a cultural space far from the rural world, man orchestrates an unexpected or even improbable encounter.
Through the course of the gardens, the landscaped space is invested in a different and singular way.
Usually hermetic to everything that is outside, the space of the garden open on the one hand to the artist, on the other to a wider audience, is transformed into an "other space", totally or partially different, a kind of heterotopia which Michel Foucault would call "absolutely different" whether they are initiatory, transgressive or stimulating. A different space which we seize, with the possibility of an appropriation, certainly never definitive, because specific to each one, but evolutionary and declinable as far as the imagination and sensitivity can go. To appropriate here is not to be understood in the sense of possessing definitively but temporarily in space time to perhaps keep it in memory in a permanent way. A treasure in which one can draw to reactivate sensations, primitive reminiscences which each human being secretly keeps within him; the desire to have a place that takes on such meaning by me and for me, it is thus to inhabit it in the manner of a resident who is passing through and can revisit what he inhabits. By decompartmentalizing the private space from the public space and by proposing an in situ work, the artist makes possible what cannot be elsewhere, brings together realities that are sometimes incompatible or have completely different meanings, and gives the possibility to think otherwise.
Karinka Szabo-Detchart