His themes range from the Siberian bear cult to digital representation of sensory systems of animals. His work centers on multi-disciplinairy cross overs between art and science in order to study the relation between human and nature. The photos of the sand maps which are shown tell the story of the landscape, the people, the economy and their movements.Īntti Tenetz is an artist and experimental documentarist from Finland. The combination of routes shows the differences in spatial organization between the two milk economies.
The visualization of the routes gave the Fulani herdsmen and the Peak transporters a new perspective on their own perception of place, mobility and economy. By projecting the movements of people and objects back onto the earth the people involved were able to reflect on their own tracks. In this way they created a cartographic representation of local and global forms of contemporary nomadic life.Ī specially developed robot fed with the GPS data drew the collected routes in the sand. They also traced the routes of the nomadic Fulani cow herders around Abuja. For NomadicMILK the artists travelled to Nigeria where they used satellite technology to trace the distribution of milk for the brand Peak from the harbour of Lagos to Abuja. They explore how navigating through the landscape gives meaning to it. In this manner, they also functioned on the tables of farms as conversation pieces to inspire discussion with farmers about working the land and their relationships to the landscape.Įsther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum create work about mobility and landscape. The Feltscapes are presented horizontally on tables to form topographical rugs. The rugs of various layers of felt form an impression of the landscape in which the material traces, holes, tracks and lines of the landscape are mapped as an immediate imprint to tell the history of co-habitation of men and landscape. In the process in which wool shrinks to felt, parallels are also formed with the material which creates the landscape of dwelling mounds. Feltscapes visualize the culture- historical characteristics of the Lionserpolder (Greidhoeke, Friesland) by showing the combination of natural formed relief and the landscape as cultivated by farmers of the ‘Old Land’, which is visible in the dwelling mounds, irregular shaped meadows, meandering ditches and special drainage systems.īy tracing the morphology of the polder with felt she finds in the production process parallels with the agricultural labour of the farmers. Cora Jongsma sets out to connect human and landscape by presenting the land as a story. The artists presented here create new forms to map land in which the lived experience and connection with the earth is expressed. We need new images to tell the story of the cohabitation of human and earth again. From the two dimensional map of the world we need to return to the three dimensional earth to anchor ourselves again in its material processes. The exhibition Grounding the Map, Mapping the Ground explores, through the work of five artists, alternative relations to the earth as a critical reflection on the abstract cartographic methods that characterize the Anthropocene. It is this astronaut gaze, which came into existence with the first image of earth taken from the Voyager in 1969, that brought forth the idea of a vulnerable earth that has to be protected as well as managed by humans, an object made up of parts which we arbitrarily can move and change. At the same time, we don’t know where we are anymore. GPS systems meant an enormous change in the way we navigate in the world, and with Google Earth world-wide mapping became possible. These images might seem to provide us with more knowledge about our planet but they are far from transparent and lead instead to an increasing abstraction and distance from earth. The typical visualization of the Anthropocene – the proposed name for our current era in which the human is the most important force behind geological transformations of the earth – is by way of satellite imagery and the simultaneous representation of enormous amounts of data of abstract earth processes and global human networks. The way in which we map and represent the world is fundamental for our relationship with the earth and the way we deal with her. Human interaction with the earth can be understood as a long history of tracing, categorizing and ordering. Mapping the Ground | Grounding the Map Exhibition with Antti Tenetz (FIN), PolakVanBekkum (NL), Cora Jongsma (NL), Amy Balkin (US), Bureau d’Etudes (FR) het Glazen Huis, January 14 – March 4, 2018
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