multi-media installation (2022)
curated by Carla Peca, with sound by Serafin Aebli
three-channel color video projection (loops, 7’-12’), colored gels on windows, the north face geodome t-shirt or tent, multichannel continuous sound *dimensions variable
«The catastrophe without event is characterized by disparate, diffuse, and ultimately undefinable scenarios, temporalities, localities, and processes. The bleak underlying feeling today is that the continuation of the present will inevitably lead to a radical break or collapse. No one knows, however, exactly how this will come about.» // Eva Horn in Future as Catastrophy, 2022
Installation Views Kulturwerk T66 (Freiburg, Germany), 2022/2023
There is a sentiment of violence in stepping onto ice with crampons. Yet, I’m encouraged by my The North Face gear to «Never Stop Exploring»—the slogan of the brand that sells thin layers to seperate body and environment.
ex-de-plora was recorded with a body-mounted GoPro mounted, a camera often used to document temporary exposures to (extreme) glacial landscapes. The work reflects on proximity to danger as metaphor for looming catastrophe, seen through the eyes of a witness and accomplice, entangled in the economy of landscape. In three continuous loops with minimal edits, we drift through tourist and science zones at Rhone Glacier and Colle Gnifetti (4’500m).
The piece draws on visual cultures of expedition, disaster, and sci-fi—high-altitude alpinism, the 2020 San Francisco wildfires, Sahara dust over the Alps (2022), Blade Runner 2047, and Mars colonization imagery—all shaping our (future) perception. ex-de-plora is a dream-like experience that is as calm as it is nightmarish. Temporal and spatial boundaries become blurry in a dialogue between filmic sequences, sound, displaced objects and colored light.
Installation view, «ex-de-plora», T66, Freiburg am Breisgau (DE), Regionale 23, 2022
Installation view «ex-de-plora», Forum/kHaus, Basel (CH), 2022
A calm yet nightmarish dream, ex-de-plora blurs temporal and spatial boundaries through film, sound, displaced objects, and colored light. A key conceptual layer is R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome—cybernetic, technocratic, and (pseudo-)ecological. Since the 1960s, the architecture resurfaces in weird models or tents for post-climate-crisis life. The North Face adapted it in the ’70s for tents and t-shirts—both reappear as displaced artefacts within ex-de-plora.
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Eva Horn (2014): Future as Catastrophe. Columbia University Press.
Gyorgy Kepes et al. (1972): Arts of the Envorinment (Vol 6 of «Vision + Value).: George Barlitzer.
Lydia Kallipoliti (2018), The Architecture of Closed Worlds. Storefront for Art and Architecture.
T.J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, Subhankar Banerjee (2021): The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change. Routledge.
Installation Views: «ex-de-plora», Forum/kHaus (Basel, CH), 2022