Climate change is one of the most talked about global issues raising deep questions about the human race and its survival. On the art scene, it has righteously become a trend, as its urgency has to be presented in all ways and places possible to invoke the masses toward conscious action. Artwork influenced by the rising climate change phenomenon is undoubtedly educating, inspiring and significant as it brings awareness and engagement in a rippling effect, stimulating our long-forgotten primary instincts of how the planet nurtures our very existence and how we can intuitively nurture her back. Good or bad art can still be effective, as it is a part of a worldly movement calling forth a revolution in our ways of being.
Olafur Eliasson’s “Ice watch“ is the most known and effectual work in this space, where he transferred and installed thirty blocks of glacial ice from the Greenland ice sheet, in locations in Paris, Copenhagen and London. In doing so he provided a chance to directly experience what’s been happening in the Arctic and thoroughly indicate the fragility of the world we live. “Ice watch” is a sensorial reminder of places being impacted by climate change, which for most of the human population, are seen in documentaries and photographs. These participatory acts call forth a public action against ignorance and indifference, and encourage pushing boundaries in new ways of thinking about the environment, the human body and its place.
I’ve recently had the chance to visit LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura for Julian Charriere’s “Towards No Earthly Pole” , an unforgettable exhibition that had left me speechless.
On entrance to the exhibition, “The purchase of the north pole” is a mysteriously wrapped in textile object giving away a form of a cannon, aggressively, pointing towards you. Around it there seemed to be cannonballs but on a closer look, coconuts in lead ‘flesh’, with title “Pacific fiction”.
The main room of the exhibition was designed as a diorama, a dark space with a long screen projection horizontally placed at the back of the room, portraying a slow-paced video of glacial masses. The video led us through the life and journey of water, showing crystallised rocky surfaces, waterfalls and ice caves. The shots had been clearly taken at night with a spotlight carried by a drone, revealing the area in unnatural light and shade. The visuals were accompanied with spectral sounds of cracking ice and flowing water, giving an impression of a living landscape; breathing and moving.
The cave/womb-like feel of the space and the entirely covered floor of artificial bitumen, covered with a layer of gravel, creaked beneath my feet, placing me in an alienated environment of sensory experience. Scattered and laying around were large heavy, drilled-patterned rocks sitting on their own cylindrical parts. Their image instantly gave a symbolic meaning of the natural resources used for consumption; implying human intervention misinterpreting landscape and history.
Along the line of the projector there were mattresses laid on the floor, welcoming the viewers to lie down and silently participate in contemplation.
A subversive experience - slow paced as it was, time stopped and a gap in time appeared in my favor, to observe the familiar and alien landscape, a play between the real and imaginary, which strangely enough felt as a moving esoteric landscape with all it’s dark and light, noise and silence, violence and peacefulness, obscurity and clarity and other poetic and disturbing attributes. The flow of sounds and visuals felt as a part of me, alive and breathing, my being as the earth; the earth as my being.
Closing a loop of thoughts, in the entry room consisting also the exit phase, the two remaining installations felt destructive, man-made and terrifying, a kind of hell that is unfortunately not far from reality. The last video piece titled “And beneath it all, flows liquid fire”, shows a fire fountain that takes us back to the very basic elements of the earth; it’s core and its role for humanity - a contradictory element of survival and extinction, subtly stressing the ephemerality of all the living and inanimate things.
Julian Charriere has personally given me a new and refreshed perspective on Art and its power to connect and revolutionize.
