THE LANDSCAPE OF THE PASSERBY

2023|Video projection - dimensions 575 x 325 cm or otherwise. Video loop duration 2:08 min. Four drawings A4 format, newspaper Free Berlin - Issue 7 (Errant Bodies Press, 2017) in cabinet display - dimensions 137 x 43 x 90 cm.

​

The Landscape of the Passerby captures and explores the moment of a random encounter between an insect, a printed text and a reader’s gaze. An insect lands on a newspaper page and meanders across it. Its presence refocuses the reader’s attention from the text to the insect’s path, which he follows with a mobile phone camera. Later, the reader tries to draw the path of the insect by looking at the video and tracing the insect’s path with a pen on a blank paper several times. The installation consists of a video projection of the video recording and a cabinet displaying four drawings and the newspaper.

​

Towards the poetics of passing by
Rather than trying to understand or represent the relation between the insect and the text, the reader makes himself available to the insect, by giving it intimate attention and following it. He persists in a suspended relation of being-with the incomprehensible other as an act of radical listening. In doing so, he grants presence to this more-than-human organism that is meandering through a landscape, which, to the human gaze, appears as a readable text. By blissfully realizing the impossibility of fully grasping the relations between the insect, the text and himself, the reader embraces and celebrates this moment of passing by as a creative act that does not originate from (his) singular individuality, desire and intention, but rather emerges from the encounter of incompatible subjectivities, meanings and attentions.