The idea of a place, landscape without designation or ownership is hard to envision. Even harder is the idea of a place existing regardless of witnesses or documentation. The forest exists and really does thrive even with no one to hear it.
Sanctity of Space explores the idea of the value of a place before human intervention. This series uses two main elements for that: figure and landscape.
Figure: landscapes by themselves are by no means a new idea, that’s the core of landscape photography. So to create the feeling of reacquainting a place there needs to be an entity that guides us, serves as a mediator, a new unit of measure - how would we know what to look for? The Figure will be set in the space, introducing the relevant meaning by interacting with its surroundings, adding a layer of meaning and questioning.
Landscape: landscapes are all that is left if you take humans out of the equation and that is exactly why it is so hard to think about them without including ourselves. Idyllic backdrops will contrast with abused one’s, juxtaposing the past and present of any place before/after human interaction - a pristine valley ecosystem and a burnt-out forest, a secluded lake and the flooded pit of an abandoned mine.
Playing with these two elements, I aim to explore and create a work that impacts the audience’s notion of land, ownership and responsibility. The fact that unexplored and virgin land is as valuable, as useful and as important as developed land. The worth of this land is an intrinsic value that is not ours to dictate, we have no input in that equation - Sanctity of Space.
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Supported by a grant from Placemaker’s “Behind the Golden Doors“, the first exploration of the idea got synthesized into a juxtaposition of common elements in both Natural and Urban environments. This proof of concept aims to create the base narrative, in terms of visuals and movement for the upcoming versions of the work.
The work is a short film exploring the intrinsic value of place. It does this through two main elements, figure and landscape. It is a movement based narrative where we follow a figure that doesn’t belong to either a natural or urban world and through its experiences we interrogate how we perceive both. As humans, how do we determine the value of a place if we are not within it? What is the relationship of a place and its surroundings if humans could be taken out of the equation? We shape the landscape to our needs, but we do not adapt ourselves to the landscape; how do we change our behaviours and perception of value? Using these questions as a basis of exploration and research, I intend to explore different perspectives of place through the body (figure), site-specific (landscape) and absurdist costumes which blur and blend into their surroundings.
The video work is the result of a day of experimentation and improvisation.
For this iteration, these are the talented artists involved:
Work by Jorge Serra, Movement by Charles Ball, Costume Design by Jimmy Eng, Audio Capture and Producing by Daniele Constance.
Enjoy.
Short.
Shots.