without title
(A T L A S)
By questioning the apparent simplicity of an ATLAS, which in its compacity and organised appearance effectively seems to hide or ignore the involution and complexity convoluted and entangled in whatever territory.
Such work addresses the discontinuity of spatiality and its inherently unstable matter constituted of aesthetic political gestures etc. The gesture of the work proposes a different reading of altered territorial approaches yet to be figured out, aiming to trigger a critical pondering on an old problem of the complex entanglement between the conceptualization of geographies and territories within military neoliberalism, which also remains - in what is now called the Anthropocene - mostly quite unresolved: the breaking down problematic conceptualisations of the ... implication of the division of the earth that stratifies proto ideas of inner/outer, us/other, here/there, calculative/experienced.
Distances, topologies, coordinates and relations are put into question proposing, with this gesture, that they are of different modes of perception and more importantly, pointing to the problematic and unsolved asymmetrical issue that they keep on remaining discriminatory on one hand and privileging on the other, in respect to anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic agents.
Etymologically the word ATLAS (greek) means something like to bear/ endure. Here the atlas is literary divided into lighter and smaller parts. Does it somehow make what it wears more bearable?
Where can the process of imagining other geographies as an artistic gesture carry out about how we connect/relate to the multiple “territories we are connected to, implying that circumstances, things, situations etc. could be different?
On the front cover of the Atlas cut into pieces we see slices of an image that transports the idea of the earth as a blue marble. It is a metaphor that became very popular and can be considered significant in shaping a collective idea of the earth as a blue marble for the last decades. It placed the idea of the earth into a position where it is dominated and controlled from the perspective of humans. Now as we are in the middle of learning differently, already naming this shift of perception, the time we are inhabiting, the Anthropocene, putting exactly this collective idea of the blue marble into question and it is more obvious than ever that the right to survive for all is very much related to an idea of coexisting and shifting how we see the earth, and to figure out other ways of measuring closeness and distance.
While proto-ideas with the Anthropocene seem so preoccupied with conveying perspectives that are down to earth and dealing with these earth issues, to keep the extraterrestrial perspective in mind and address the unresolved absurdities of frontier geographies affecting primarily human concern not to lose sight of. As even though there is now a name for the new epoch we are about to learn - the Anthropocene - it has not catapulted us out of the military neoliberalism based on nation-state building, which is still screwing things up.
It can give birth to many other possible questions like what would an atlas for the new geological age look like that make accessible the fact that the earth is breaking into human thinking?
On extractivist, mining, drug trafficking, identity discourses, tourism, violating economies, migration, sediments of neo-capitalism, political power, nation-state ideologies, military border surveillance etc.
