Factitious Imprints | Eva Papamargariti

Factitious Imprints (2016) by Eva Papamargariti is a reflection on an idea of “constructed” nature: it is not only the landscape to be artificial, which the human beings modify, bend to their own needs and consumes, but also the idea of what it is “natural”: what was primordial, what existed before is totally reconstructed. The human traces are so deep that it is often not possible to go back to a time before men.

Papamargariti organizes a patrol in this territory and resumes with a drone the footprints left by humanity: waste, debris, slag and non-bio-degradable waste. The environment shown to us is a clever hybrid between digitally constructed scenarios and shots of real places where the attempts of mankind to insinuate themselves into the biological structure are pervasive: landfills and wind turbines are men’s attempt to create a landscape in which “synthetic” and “biological” coexist indissolubly. The sense of distortion that this investigation of the territory transmits is also visible thanks to the syncopated movements of the drone footage, actually video recordings made with telephones or video cameras.

What will happen to the landscape when we stop observing it? Will these plastic residues remain to testify the landscape of our civilization? Could they be used as finds for an archeology of our era? How will the post-human era be analyzed historically? But above all, will there be a post natural era?

 
©Eva Papamargariti, Factitious Imprints, 2016, detail
HD video, 1080 x 1920, color, 9:18”
Courtesy METRONOM
10/02/2021