TERESA AROZENA. ‘Kanarische Landschaften’

Being capable of remembering is a vital act of resilience. We remember the key moment when the concept of “landscape” mutated from noun to verb. It happened in the late 20th century, when landscape critique emerged from visual studies and became the focus of historical, political and aesthetic surveillance. From being perceived as an object, it began to be understood as the process through which social subjectivities and identities are formed. If landscapes were always spaces converted into device, spaces were always res intesa, force fields incarnate: they write about us and they permeate us. This exhibition could be defined as an exercise in landscapeness on a touristified Earth; a cyclorama in the theatre of a civilization whose mediatized politics departs from the colonial matrix of power and its culture of business, its relentless conquest of space and time.

Kanarische Landschaften proposes a perspective where the strategies of displacement and appropriation attempt to make us conscious of our own narratives and devices. It adopts to the cultural inheritance of the Eurocentric imagination to reaffirm the link between photography and painting, which calls on the narrative of the history of western representation. From this place, we are invited to take a step back and exercise a sort of extraterrestrial gaze in search of an effect of distancing, but also one of approximation to the improbable, to see by touching, to explore the diffractions, the patterns of interference and the scars of a fabric that was always broken.