hole

Pushed by market pressure, the city creeps further and further into the country, rushing against the mountain slopes like water. In this globalized age, we have conquered space, covered Nature under our network of roads and digital coordinates. Nature is so integrated within the human world it has become invisible. Art theoretician Amanda Boetzkes recently wrote, that in the context of the ecological crisis, we should withdraw from nature. Art should offer an “acknowledgment of our limits and an offering of that limit to what lies beyond, namely, the irreducible earth”.

But there is no visible limit, there is no border. Walking out the door, stepping outside, we are still within. There are no wild beings staring at us on the other side, no strange Other to face. Nature has disappeared, covered under our tracks.

 

This installation seeks to unearth a boundary with Nature. It is made of a sample extracted from a mountain surface and brought back within the museum walls. The visitors are placed face to face with the foreign presence of the grass, moss and plants, while a photograph shows their absence on the mountain surface, where a patch of ground is left naked, and exposed.

 

The focus of the artwork is not the natural object itself, but the contrast between the natural place of its extraction and the place where it is exhibited. Both places collide, contracted within the circular edge of the installation as in a black hole, the distance between both all the more salient. The visitor stands at the hole's ledge, facing nature again as a strange Other, to respect and withdraw from.