Hands gliding through illustrations of a brain, glitched with tree bark. A tiny glass lens inverting mountain summits. Night-vision camera capturing the hide and seek between fox and rabbit. Motion tracking of a dancing plant.
Gosia Lehmann (DE) and Caterina Gobbi (IT) present ‘Lens Is To Blame’, a psychedelic ride through different scales of perception. The artists disassemble image-making techniques by turning forests and mountains into a ‘film studio’, juxtaposing wilderness with the synthetic colour of a green-screen. The optical instruments scanning the landscape are accompanied by field-recordings of electricity lines, which are part of the environment even in the most secluded places (as in this case the Aosta Valley Alps). Lens enables us to see inside of our body and out in the space, making us better understand what is around us and at the same time creating the separation between humans and what we consider as ‘nature’. In the measured world what does ‘natural’, ‘wild’ or ‘pure’ even refer to?
During their collaboration, the artists visited each-other, in opposite surroundings – the mountains in Italy and Berlin. The work combines their interests in feminism and ecology, hinting on the idea that the environment is an entanglement of different times, some that we can perceive as well as others existing at different speeds. Gosia and Caterina explore these diverse scales by imitating what is witnessed by rock formations or the slowest motion of lichen growth. Repetition, acceleration or deceleration are all relative to one single perspective, or is there a way that could open up new modes of perception allowing us to further engage with the non-human viewpoint?
