figure/ground, 2022. Camila de Caux and Nico. installation, collection of objects, archival box, watercolors, and poems on index cards.
The Dark Forest, 2022. Eric Macedo. digital photography on paper, 45 cm x 30 cm each.
If every forest is the sky, 2022. Eric Macedo. digital photography on fabric.
Uneven Green, 2022. Camila de Caux, Eric Macedo, and Moritz Gansen. Soundscape. 14’45”
Uneven Green is the result of six months of walks around the Schloss Solitude, during a residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2021. The three works assembled here emerged unexpectedly, during daily walks of the artists with their now 2-year-old child, Nico, and explore a perspectival turn into the ontology and rhythmic sensibilities of the forest.
In the photo series The Dark Forest, Eric portrays the forest as a domestic alien, eliciting an image of the vegetation as radical otherness. The images create an analogy between the mysterious aspects of the cosmos beyond Earth and the dark sides of life on this planet. Entire new worlds have been revealed by recent research about plants, including insights into their particular modes of sensing, communicating, and expressing intelligence. The findings only highlight how little we still know about beings that are so ubiquitous as to often be merged with the landscape.
figure/ground is an installation made of small objects collected from different ground surfaces. Engaged in daily gestures of observation, contact, and enchantment, Camila and Nico dedicated themselves to the minimal stories revealed by each detail. Gathered in a collection, the objects recombine themselves in different assemblages, inviting each other into constellations of wordless meaning. Depicted in watercolors and coupled with minimalist metaphors, the objects were arranged on index cards, performing a delicate caricature of classification methods.
The audio piece, also entitled Uneven Green, is produced in partnership by the artists and Moritz Gansen. Experimenting with different temporalities, it explores the uncanny soundscape of the forest’s hidden beings. Like celestial bodies frugally shining in dark space, the forest is not taken as a simple inspirational setting but as a living critter.
Camila de Caux is a writer and artist interested in the confluence between literary aesthetics and anthropological questioning, working around notions of multiple ontologies and corporeality, and their reverberations in political practices.
Eric Macedo is a social anthropologist and photographer, working on themes related to colonialism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism, and alterity relations.
