Theodoros Zafeiropoulos - Quest of Query: Applied Altitudes

About

The exhibition activates one of the core concepts of Quest of Query, the notion that “landscape is not innocent,” while it engages with the theme of the flow of development in the global system. The digitally processed photo collage presents an immense mountain top view of Fløyen, an amusement landmark and natural fence for Bergen. This symbolic mountain site, hidden from the city, is a culmination of a series of infinite digital transformations, in which the very real issues of global environmental politics today—such as the financialization and commodification of nature—are im-planted and compressed. The panorama contains numerous signifiers of human transcendence and interventions within an illusionary, sci-fi representation: machineries and constructions such as deep-water oil drilling rigs, power plants, touristic facilities, waste disposal sites, as well as solar parks, hydro, and wind power units as alternatives to fossil fuel energy production. This environment is not a natural habitat but a field of social and political imprints.

Applied Altitudes, as an invented model of perceiving the world, operates through the creation of illusion. This constructed environment of carbon footprints, human interferences, traces, and leftovers has “real” objects and elements, but taken as a whole, it is a “natural allegory,” an image of a non-existent conceptual land. The monumental panorama builds on the alluring illusion-effect, while it also contains the dangers inherent in the (ab)uses of nature. This picturesque synthesis, not unlike a testimony with morals, is more of a narrative than just an image; it is a display of parts of a new world that we are building for ourselves.

** The exhibition Applied Altitudes is the fourth chapter of the project Quest of Query. The first two chapters were presented in Budapest in 2014 at the international contemporary art organization tranzit.hu and at the Deák Erika Gallery. The third chapter will be presented at the Center of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniki (Warehouse B1, port, part of the State Museum of Contemporary Art) from January 23 to March 9, 2015, entitled Quest of Query: Interpretations of the Actual curated by Eszter Szakács.