(in)visible air
Environmental problems seem obvious — air pollution or trash in the city is easy to see and can be dealt with. But many other problems are much harder to see. Burning coal simultaneously pollutes urban air, melts glaciers somewhere very far away and causes mass protests against unfair resource allocation and corruption. melting permafrost, gradual but inevitable climate change, increasing concentration of people in megacities — processes too long in time and space to be seen. It may seem that it is impossible to influence global processes, that it is too late to change anything and only an aloof observer can be left. But deep awareness changes the nature of action, and the will, desire and knowledge of many people are commensurate with the scale of climate change.
The Practice of the Place
Landscape in art traditionally reproduces a kind of contingent space as a neutral background, serving as a receptacle for similarly passive objects awaiting rational human influence. This aesthetic tradition reflects deeply rooted notions of human exceptionalism that have caused devastating climatic, economic and political disasters. «The Practice of Place» is an interdisciplinary project of sensitivity to the tangled connections between people and active, fluid, pulsating materiality. The project seeks dialogue between all forms of collaborative actors, where objects and factors of particular physical spaces affect human practices as much as people invade space.
The Trepang Syndrome
The recent series of economic, ecological and social catastrophes has brought fears and phobias displaced in the cinema back into reality. These concepts are not identical: the objects of phobias are always known, but they only cover the true causes of fear. At the same time, the objects of fear easily lend themselves to distortion and purposeful ideological substitution, participating in the manipulation of mass consciousness.
The exhibition is embedded in the fabric of urban space, where there are enough objects for phobias, but it is not known whether they represent a threat or not.
*Trepang is a marine organism that literally explodes from the inside in case of real or imagined danger, always ready for an unambiguous response to an external stimulus, even at the cost of its own safety.
