Photographer | DOP | Content Creator | Visual Artist
Habitat
Body and lanscape awareness
Video-installation and photography amalgamate in HABITAT to define a favorable Environment, not only for reflection but also for aesthetic contemplation. Through video installation the audience is invited for the first time to be a part of her work, therefore, they are also invited to wonder about the relationship between men and nature. As Joachim Ritter suggests, the landscape is a cultural construct created by modern society, which being away from nature is only able to admire its beauty once it has emancipated from the needs that linked it to nature. Nevertheless, the landscape does not exist without a viewer that considers that this piece of nature is subject to be contemplated, the artist invites the audience to consider another point of view. She pushes the spectator to abandon his passive observer role and to get into nature so as to get his body involved by nature. At the same time, while the body becomes a receptacle of sensations during this aesthetic experience, it is when the body blends in with nature when it becomes a conscious part of it. As the artist claims, our society has forgotten that we are a part of nature, that we come from it and that it rules over us, those are the reasons why we shall come back to it.
Only after this reflection and after being aware of their own bodies, should the audience face the photographic series. Regarding the series, we could play with the two viewpoints that the author proposes, either contemplating the landscape as a voyeur or to experiment nature as a part of ourselves and our bodies. Since our body, as Marleau-Ponty states, introduces ourselves in what is visible- the landscape in this case- and the body itself becomes visible too. There is a possibility of feeling this perceptive phenomenon- since sighting is inherent in whatever that is visible- through photographs, we must see with our bodies and sense bodies visible within them. The landscape still maintains its emotional character from Stimmung (2013), however, in this case the artist works with male nude for the first time. Nature, man and woman appear in their primitive communion, where the artist is eager to come back. In this reencounter, both bodies- masculine and feminine- are sometimes indistinguishable from one another; in addition, nude bodies and the shapes found in the landscape create a new identity. Nature and body, whose sensuality has condemned them to evolve into creative power for a long time, now recover their vital essence, their instinct, in order to return to life this numb world. The artist creates through different ways a habitat: a place which joins together the suitable conditions to encourage a fertile relationship between life, Art and nature.
Sol Izquierdo