The project “Landscape Experience” can be divided into three conceptual wholes. One consists of photographs of “toxic landscapes”, the second is a video art installation consisting of a video and a floor installation of “ready-made” objects and the third is an independent work with moving images.
1.
The photographs, which can be defined as documentary photography, depict a beautiful and abandoned geopolitical region on the border with Serbia, which used to have arsenic, antimony and chromium mines that have not been operational for a long time. Now those areas are deserted and desolate, in some places there are still embankments with residues of arsenic sulphite and antimony that are dispersed by natural and climatic conditions. The very colour of this ore, orange-red, creates magical and surreal landscape creations, which are likable and seem otherworldly, on the other hand, they are silent witnesses to “stories that must not be told.” Their discursiveness lies in the toxicity and destructive power of that beauty to the health of people and animals as well as the destruction of the environment. In the immediate vicinity of these abandoned mines there is a school, where children attend classes and one can often hear chatter in the distance. According to the world list of dangerous substances, arsenic is at the top in terms of toxicity to humans. Prolonged exposure has severe consequences to people’s health, often with a tragic epilogue. That is why arsenic is named the silent and invisible killer. Centuries ago, it was used as medicine, but also as an ideal poison. Drinking water in this region has 100 times more arsenic than allowed in its composition and that is the basis of the opposition of the “milk of dreams”. The lack of official data and parameters, as well as the failure of the competent authorities to take measures, indicate the devastating level of awareness and responsibility of the social mechanisms and the corrupt importance and disregard of the humanistic aspect before the capitalist one.[3] These toxic and “wounded landscapes” become ruins of human greed and cause existential debris. The materiality of the landscape becomes the materialisation of death, so the formal aesthetics – beauty opposes the painful and deviant conceptual ugliness.
2.
In the second work, in addition to the plasticity of the “transformed landscape panopticons”, the authors introduce the body – the man (or its allusion) as a symbol of power, but also as a fragile and easily overcome force. This conceptual connection inaugurates a unique form of intimacy, closeness and attachment to something historically harmful and materially toxic.[4] The video artwork through body play, rhythm, beat, sound, repetition processes the discourse of pelivanism, a martial art characteristic of the Balkan region, which is a symbol of perseverance, heroism, tradition, passed down from generation to generation, carrying the ideology of strength and winning, but at the same time not hurting, but protecting. The naked body of the pelivans becomes a synonym for beauty, for an ancient male body. The visual dynamics and the powerful repetitive sound arrangement contribute to stimulating the recipient’s meditation and metaphysicality, and the aesthetically beautiful pre-combat performance turns into a dance full of life and energy. In contrast to this highly vertical composition of the video, which abounds of existential fullness, on the floor, in front of this video, rises an imaginary landscape – a floor installation consisting of 230 transformed military helmets. It is a spatial agglomeration of ready-made helmets that once had their utilitarianism and application to protect someone’s head (in the wars throughout the region from the recent and distant past) on which artistic intervention was performed. In fact, the authors apply human hair to them, a process through which these ready-made objects acquire an inverse connotation, and the once functional helmets now become dysfunctional and a testimony to new bodies – “new humanized objects”, which unfortunately no longer protect, but become an allusion to all lives lost. This installation contains many layered levels of contextuality, from general discourses on life and death and changing their positions, touching on the aspects of the power of politics and its influence on human destinies and struggle for existence, to the absurdity of war and evil.
In the third work – the video object, Jankuloski-Moteska perform a visual narration related to the injured landscapes, and the absence/presence of man in them. To connect this artistic compilation of moving images, they filmed in tree locations (some already appearing in the previous two conceptual wholes), which have their analogy in the general context of the absurdity of existence, linking and uniting the other two parts. One location is the antimony and arsenic mines on the outskirts of our country. The already elaborate “space” orange-red landscapes, which were the subject of interest predominantly in the photographic cycle, are deepened here through the view of the video camera, and the conceptual basis for poisoning is upgraded and dramatized by including a human figure, in which they break the harmony of that toxic area. Through the spatial material playfulness of their presence and absence, the figures, together with the helmets that are being rolled downhill those arsenic sediments, become direct visualization of the many victims of these landscapes, the unobtrusive sound, further increases the “silent” grief and nausea of the recipient of this conceptual discourse.
[3] Jankuloski-Moteska treat the issue of appropriation, as well, not only of this one but of many other mines too, from the state or the capitalists. They are uncompromisingly abusing and exploiting them, not taking into account any other aspect (nature, environment, geography, people, toxicity, eco system), neglecting any care about the reminiscences and risk aspects, not considering the closure procedures or taking any measures of protection. All this is another assimilationist and hegemonic approach of the governmental policies, but the nature finds its own way of defending and restoring itself, unlike people who are fragile and fail to escape the dominant.
[4] Polmuk, Chairat, “Wounded Landscapes: Debris of War, Residual Vulnerability, and (Toxic) Intimacy in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia”, The Jugaad Project, 3 June, (www.thejugaadproject.pub/home/wounded-landscapes#_ftn16), acc. on 3/17/2022.