Land And Rocks Weathered By the Sea and Air

Installation view, Land and Rocks Weathered By the Sea and Air, 80x60x8cm

from the cycle Fixing On the Verge of Disappearance, 2024

Land and Rocks Weathered by the Sea and Air raises questions around the reliability and presentation of the spaces surrounding us. The display case takes inspiration from a collection of sun-faded images I encountered in the buffer zone of Cyprus. What first captivated me was the accidental composition of these generic landscape depictions—each distanced from its original state by a chromatic shift in the ink. The blue image exposes the fragility of spatial and temporal structures, revealing the landscapes we inhabit as unstable, always on the verge of dissolution. On Cyprus, this instability is politically accentuated by the island’s division through a militarized border zone and, on a personal level, was further heightened by the devastating twin earthquakes that struck southern Türkiye just one day before my arrival.

I am drawn to how the erosion of a landscape — something vast and continuously occurring, yet largely imperceptible to the human eye—is mirrored in the physical degradation of the photograph itself. Following the lead of these images means navigating a geography of uncertainty. They may guide us toward nothing at all—spiraling both outward and inward at the same time: out into the blue atmospheric distances of the world, down into abyssal depths. Beneath the last cyan layer of ink sits the blank white space of paper. Nothingness. Atmosphere and abyss; these are spaces we cannot inhabit, yet some will continuously attempt to conquer.

 Land And Rocks Weathered by The Sea and Air is an attempt in personal place-making; a thought experiment in entering an image where we exist in multiple places at once. It asks what it could look like to inhabit the margins of both location and image in the 21st century.