Precisely 250 years ago, in 1755, the Lisbon earthquake changed the direction of social thinking and artistic achievements of the 18th century to a great extent. More than 40 per cent of Portugal’s land burnt down in this year’s forest fires have not even been noticeably commented on and the recent catastrophe in New Orleans has up to now by no means influenced the way of contemplating our world. Why?
Natural catastrophes at that time, and today even less so, are nothing unusual. What has changed, and in one of incarnations / variations become emblematic of post-modern thinking, is the definition of the catastrophe itself. Instead of presenting it just as an unusual, unique and unexpected event, which stands for a breach in the historical flux of events, in the twentieth century human experience is full of shocks, conflicts, crises and dangers. Apart from that, we are exposed to the media coverage of such events, almost unimaginable until a mere hundred years ago. However, permanent replays by the media and their focusing on catastrophes make things banal; marginalise and trivialise the magnitude of events. The occurrence rate of catastrophes (from wars and conflicts to industrial, traffic and natural ones) has to a great extent pushed our tolerance limit upwards, so today we consider a catastrophe a normal part of our lives.
This exhibition, focusing on stretches of burnt down forest at the Adriatic coast, is a contribution to a different, personal perception of cataclysmic events. A cycle of photographs addresses not only the aesthetic, but also the emotional viewer, warning of extreme fragility of natural order of things, including the human being-because with every big natural cataclysm something dies, also reminding us of our own mortality. At the level of contemplation the drive for death acts so that it cuts connections and stops the process of symbolisation. Rejecting reality always serves the splitting of I and it is most obvious in the passage of time. Time is nostalgic and photographs actively inspire nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, the art of (semi)darkness. All photographs are a memento mori, because they stop a moment. By cutting of a moment and freezing it, photographs witness the relentless melting of time. A desire for oversensitivity, for ending the penetration beneath the surface, for redemption and glorification of life, are also interwoven into this stopping. All those elements of originally erotic feeling of life are present here as well, in the form of “time travel” year in, year out, but to the same place and in the form of checking / memorising the real, natural progress – from the moment of quietening down onwards, immediately after the fire has ceased, when former shapes can still be recognised, but already lost to the future set-up of fullness, which uses the same elements, assembling them differently. This set-up is then seemingly paradoxically interrupted by a result of human “progress” – tourism.
In spite of everything, people are fascinated by death and accidents. The most obvious example for that is a crowd that out of nowhere gathers around any accident. During the last few decades, this fascination has entered the domain of tourism as well. Places of death are destinations for millions of tourists every year: Auschwitz, Birkenau, Oklahoma City, Somme and Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Places of industrial accidents, like Bhopal or Chernobyl have just begun to take their place in the developing industry of media spectacle. No matter whether we call it “dark tourism” (Lennon and Foley), “thanatourism” (Seaton), or “black spots” (Rojek), it is not only becoming an increasingly lucrative activity, but also a phenomenon linked to growing aesthetisation in the follow-up of events by the media, along with the practice of transferring the holocaust discourse to all contemporary catastrophes – from epistemological and aesthetic approach to ideas about the role of media in similar occasions – which makes it a repository of images in the form of a “constructed landscape of collective aspirations” (Appadurai).
In 2002, Paul Virilio suggested the foundation of Musée des accidents, which would serve as a storage place and remainder of all kinds of accidents, which up to now has not been realised, whereas a temporary display of photo and video material regarding natural catastrophes and the ones caused by human actions has. This exhibition, however, goes a step further then just “simple” recording. First, by subsequently visiting the same place every year, finality of an apocalyptic event – fire – is negated, showing that even in seemingly dead, almost non-earthly landscape, there is a life force transcending the usual anthropocentric perspective, thus necessarily questioning the usual notion of the relation between life and death on the individual level. Additional accessories, in every promotion indispensable for a successful holiday, produce an unexpected transfer already at the level of seemingly incompatible common icons (burnt-down landscape and beach accessories). By an “enlightening” turnover, the cyclic quality of natural processes is applied to the cyclic property of human “progress”. Places burnt down by extensive tourism are becoming a new tourist product. Human fascination with death and destruction is linked to the contemporary obsession with leisure time in an almost perfect way: different modi turn one into other and overlap, whereas one of central topics of human thought, death, is ritualised in the canon of art and thereby becomes death we can cope with.
The death of the landscape photographed here must be accepted and experienced as aesthetic pleasure, but also as a warning about the sensitivity towards the uniqueness of life – everything less than that would be a failure of the author, but of a viewer as well.
Igor Marković
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Barbara Blasin was born in 1973 in Zagreb. She graduated design at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Zagreb.
