Landschaft?! [Landscape?!]
Photographs abn book | 2014
Funded by the Postgraduate Funding of Thuringia
Marcel Mischke‘s three photographs are an excerpt from the practical part of his Ph.D. project entitled »Landschaft?!« [Landscape?!]. The work is an experiment in visualising a contradiction: We live in an exclamatory anthropocene and have a significant impact on the appearance of our planet. We plan logistics centres, create tailings heaps, operate strip mines, cultivate monocultures, and so forth. We create environments which must essentially function, are efficiency-oriented, and must conform to safety standards – and at the same time we all dream of an intact, untouched landscape. Landscape is now, as always, considered »romantic« and in this sense resembles a localisation of the emotional. We understand it as a symptomatic experiential space holding the potential of an aesthetic quality.
But what happens when we overlay one upon the other; when we artistically capture landscapes with romantic criteria that are distinctly and purely functional places? When the »endlessness of the mountains« overshadows the dirty coal heap?