DIGITAL VIDEO WALL

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 is an artist based between London and Athens. Her practice focuses on moving images but also printed materials and sculptural installations that explore the relationship between digital space and material reality. She is interested in the creation of 2d/3d rendered spaces and scenarios which provoke narrations based on the obscure simultaneous situations happening in a quotidian frequency on the verge of digital and physical environments, blurring the boundaries between these ‘ecosystems.’ Her work delves into issues and themes related to simultaneity, the merging and dissolving of our surroundings with the virtual, the constant diffusion of fabricated synthetic images that define and fragment our identity and everyday experience, the symbiotic procedures and entanglement that take place between humans, nature and technology; again, processes that are established through online presence, as well as the traces that our operations inscribe to the objects and habitat where we find ourselves situated into, through our continuous interaction with devices and mechanic artifacts.

Factitious Imprints |Eva Papamargariti
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