The second landscape inspiration is Markovi Kuli or Marko’s Towers, a beautiful natural granite complex that with its monumentality and variety of denuded forms causes aesthetic sensation and admiration, as if it were a metaphysical landscape. The authors pay attention to the materiality of space, and transform this landscape into a place of “residual vulnerability”[5], physical and environmental exposure to associative remnants of war that allows artistic articulation of harmful but also constitutive forms of intimacy and action. In the metaphysical and meditative beauty of this landscape, traces of human existence suddenly begin to appear, incorporated through the materialization of death. The materiality of the landscape is complemented by a performative act of rolling helmets downhill as a symbol of severed heads in many absurd wars.
“The need to fit placeless memories into an imagined or imaginary place with the search for moral bearings and a point of view.”[6]
The frames showing the marble mines are the third location where the most beautiful white marble from Prilep is extracted. This are places of trauma, direct devastation and injury to nature. The tectonic disturbances, stratigraphic changes, and excruciating sounds coming from the “uprooting of the landscape” represent places of remembrance, allusive historical stratification and affective sedimentation of violence now and in the past. These frames generally indicated a traumatic experience that could disperse in time and space, pervading the tangled relationships between places and people.
This video artwork as a whole is a visual manipulation of an expressive act with sub-contexts with explicit and transferable power of expression, which is achieved with the repetitiveness, transitions, and intensity of moving images, with the changing frames of the wide-angle display of the action and focusing on the unobtrusive natural and partitive symbolic sound of ‘rolling’ of the helmets and the crash of the marble blocks falling, for even more pronounced affectivity…
What does it mean to place the wounded landscape as an archive of historical injuries and how does this poetics of spatial testimony function as a means of geopolitical critique? – or In lieu of a conclusion
The “Landscape Experience” project deals predominantly with the causes and absurdities of human existence, with the beautiful and the ugly, with the crisis of the spirit, but it also deals with the dominance of capital, colonial policies, ideologies and technology that influence the disfigurement of the balance of man, wildlife and the natural environment in the ecosystem. This multinational trans-tactical project of the Jankuloski-Moteska tandem in a critical-discursive way call attention to the dangers that lurk if serious systemic steps are not taken to overcome the greatest challenges of the Anthropocene, which are a tax on capitalism and government policies, the uncontrolled misuse of the natural resources of the planet Earth in the form of mindless wars (explicit or implicit, real or psychological, physical or chemical) in the name of someone’s ideals, in which we are all victims, and most of all the youngest, the innocent and the idealists. Can the beautiful be at the same time insidiously ugly, can the aesthetic become a servant of evil, but with the intention of finding the right path to transform into a warning? All these questions, by re-examining the thesis of the banality of evil, are disposed in the “Landscape Experience” project.
Finally, interpreting a verse from a song by Frank Zappa, we can conclude that “the ugliest part of the human body is not the nose or fingers, but the ‘brain’” which leads to the paradox of human existence.
[5] “Residual vulnerability” means the experience of physical and environmental injury that testifies to the temporary nature of the historical injury.
[6] Ulrich Baer, “To Give Memory a Place: Contemporary Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition,” in Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 83.