Paysage

YEAR
2005
Ongoing

VENUES

Maneж, RU 2016
Somerset House, UK 2015
Outdoor Festival, IT 2015
Epicenter Projects, USA 2014
Noordkaap Artspace, NL 2011

LOCATIONS
USA, EU, Paraguay, Russian Federation, Bhutan, Colombia

Aesthetics of now

‘Paysage’ is an ongoing and multidisciplinary investigation of contemporary landscape, trying to restitute a general feeling of what aesthetics and influences of contemporary existence is through a variety of medias. While the preliminary approach to analysis often starts from on-field research, visual documentation and collection of items, the final output often comes in a variety of medias involving the use of photography, video, 3D scanning and printing, recording and mapping in order to render the complexity of the dense relationship between identity and landscape.

The project uses references of contemporary experience with specific political, urban and digital aesthetics, stirring existential meanings in a difficult environment to frame.

Developed in the form of installations and performance it aims to reflect the spontaneity and short-term memory of contemporary-age, characterised by constant emergencies, moments of danger (or collective hysteria), and described by sociologists with words like ‘liquid’ and ‘transitional’.
The chaotic overlapping of different – but contiguous – aesthetics paradoxically combining them with the aesthetics of propaganda and desire, echoing the sociological treaties of Bauman and Sennett; temporary and sometimes unstable structures are a metaphor for the precarious, the leftovers of an era swiftly coming to an end, but mostly of the interchangeability to which are subject also the most profound concepts, including ideologies and surrogates of religion, at this point of history.

In this shifting context, what does identity means? And above all, which are the characteristics defining it better, and making it tangible? Globalisation and its contiguous ideology, Neoliberalism, created an ubiquitous kind of urbanism and architectural style that we can see in every corner of the world: main streets displaying the same stores that are also often found in airports, suburbias that are impossible to navigate without private transportation, services and imagery connected to them shifting as fast as online-based trends, materials and finishings for architecture have never been so similar everywhere. What is interesting is that the substantial characteristic of the Neoliberalism, the ideology which shaped internationally the last 40 years is confusion: we don’t know where things come from, we don’t know where they end, we don’t know what’s the collective price for them and we don’t know how long they’ll last, but as long as it’s perceived as ‘progress’ or ‘smart’ it all has a reason to exist.

Many references are also pointing towards appealing imagery and what is perceived as exotic to underline cultural glitches, biases paving the way for an understanding of ethics – or the lack of it, appropriation, sustainability; symbology and veneration are aspects of religion, but how do we frame them in a societal context that decided to declare an emancipation from god? Which simulacra is worshipped in this historical moment, within the dominating Liberal framework? Which symbol became untouchable in this schizophrenic proposal of symbols?

Architectural citations and digital details mix together translating into the two levels of landscape we are immersed in, underlying plenty of contradictions, starting with the rising trend of border fortifications opposed to the instant circulation of informations and capital: these contradictions are propaganda tool of the Neoliberal era, as they fuel a cognitive dissonance that makes critique more difficult by obfuscating perceptions.

Many of the photographic materials that make installations and assemblages come from places on the planet seemingly unrelated to each other, at least geographically, but they find a common denominator in the cause-effect of the globalised economy and in the infrastructure of digital information; architectural documentation, digital feeds, details of everyday life make an attractive kaleidoscopic framework precisely because it’s all we know through personal experience, but at the same time it’s all we can’t fully master because it’s created to be beyond our reach.