Sacha-thesis outline

• personal diary to describe experiences while photographing
• method description of my work

(* a fictive diary of constructed landscapes?)

• studies on the Anthropocene
• how do (native) people see their environment?

The making of mountains: In this research project I’m making a method description of my work. Describing all steps and experiences within the making process, then the selection process and eventually the presentation process. This will help me reflecting on why I’m taking the steps that I take. It will also give more depth and inside into the experiences I have while taking my photographs.

References:

Aldo Leopold: Think like a mountain

Robert Mcfarlane: a lot of books

Vilem Flusser: NATURAL: MIND

Conversations with landscape – Karl Benediktsson, Katrin Anna Lund

Examples: the making of 40 photographs - Ansel Adams

Space is the place – Lukas Feireiss

Landscape and power – W.J.T. Mitchell

The Living Mountain - Nan Shepherd

Mountains Of The Mind - Robert Mcfarlane

Natural:Mind - Vilém Flusser

The production of space - Henri Lefèbvre

The Sublime Anthropocene - Byron Willisto

A Terrible Beauty: Art and learning in the Anthropocene - Shiralee Hudson Hill Timothy Morton Clive Hamilton Bruno Latour

Introduction

Before I came to Piet Zwart Institute I already had a strong interest in how we, as humans, interact with the landscapes around us. I've been researching this relationship in my work for a long time now and themes as romanticism, escapism and the sublime are at the core of making it. In this introduction I’ll do a retrospect on what I made before and what I’m working on now.

Earlier work

About ten years ago, I made a shift in the media I used. While studying in the painting department of my Bachelor's, I started using photography. I became attracted to remote and vast landscapes, but they also urged me to manipulate them. I did that by putting a person and/or object in the landscape, to make the scene feel alienating. I wanted to play with nature as we observe it when we, for example, go for a walk in the forest. This way I showed that our recognizable environments can be transformed into a space for mysterious dreams.

The objects I used were, in contrast to the landscape, very man made. Materials like plastic sheets, balloons, pvc pipes or rope. I always tried to find a contrast as well as an agreement with the objects and the landscape. Sometimes I want to emphasize the playfulness or turn the human figure into some divine creature that has floating objects around itself. Human beings are predominant on this planet, but at the same time we are just little creatures in this massive environment.

What kind of role we take in as human beings in nature is still something I want to explore in my work. The human figure in my images is always me, because for me it’s important to really experience that particular moment within the landscape myself. It is about searching for that sublime experience. The experience that is always bound to nature and makes you feel powerful and very small at the time.

Recently

In 2020, I started doing my Master’s degree at Piet Zwart Institute. The covid-19 pandemic broke out in this year and traveling was out of the question. Under Covid restrictions, I started working in the studio to make self-constructed landscapes. I wanted to escape the reality I inhabited. Missing the possibility to go places, at first I wanted to make landscapes that look like Earth. When I was forced to cancel my trip to the Alps I started to build my own snowy mountains. Later I became interested in traveling even further and became inspired by distant expeditions and images from other planets. I started to incorporate the alien aspect in these self-constructed landscapes. Some of the images evoke uncanniness that speaks of alien landscapes, dreams of the ‘otherworldly’ and science fiction cinema. Through my miniaturisation of landscape photography, I have been able to focus on photography as image making rather than recording. Instead of capturing an image, I created an image from scratch by building a landscape myself. This gives a lot of control in the image-making. I developed interesting methods within this project to explore themes of escapism and traveling within strict limitations. The works deceives the viewer, creating a sublime landscape from otherwise prosaic materials. This way I want to challenge the notion of the imagined sublime and our willingness to believe in it.

Now

In 2021, when traveling was accessible again, I made a series of photographs in the Swiss Alps. In this series I approached the mountains as beings. They seem in constant motion by the changing light and the clouds lurking over them. Where normally the mountains of Switzerland are associated with the picturesque, I wanted to show the roughness of the landscape. After a lot of driving, climbing and walking, the mountains seemed to be ‘coming at me’. I felt shaky and light in my head. This force of nature took me over. The landscapes are isolated and in most of the photographs there’s no trace of humans. They become alienating. Through the black and white, I show the roughness and purity of the surroundings.

While photographing outside again, I've noticed that my gaze had changed. Whereas I normally pack a lot of materials and equipment, I now made this series with one camera and lens. I didn’t take ‘props’ but only focused on the mountains themselves. I was more focused on getting close instead of capturing the vastness of the landscape. The textures and tactile-ness in this work made me want to create mountains out of other materials myself again.

At the moment I am building landscapes out of natural materials again, but also out of very human-made materials such as 3D prints. I'm researching the question: 'What does it mean when you construct a landscape?'. We live in the Anthropocene, the 'geological era of man', in which the (disastrous) influence of man is present everywhere on earth.