Tour du monde à la voile 2019
Tour du monde à la voile 2019 (WV C 020)
In-situ installation FRAC d`Alsace, Sélestat | Recycled concrete chunks, with steel reinforcements, 3 digital roll prints, printed on both sides | Total size: 1300 x 280 x 600 cm | Fig.3: Selection of concrete chunks in the recycling plant
In-situ installation FRAC d`Alsace, Sélestat | Recycled concrete chunks, with steel reinforcements, 3 digital roll prints, printed on both sides | Total size: 1300 x 280 x 600 cm | Fig.3: Selection of concrete chunks in the recycling plant
The installation "Tour du monde à la voile" (Round the world sailing) was made specifically for FRAC Alsace and consists of three flags (or "sails") printed on both sides, showing so-called "Hill Shade Scannings" and hanging freely in the space, complemented with an accumulation of recycled demolition concrete blocks arranged on the floor.
The Hill Shade Scannings interpret a landscape in Vorarlberg. They are scientific, taken-over representations created by scanning the earth's surface with lasers from an airplane. They are used in geographic cartographic contexts and are also used to accurately analyze the terrain and make predictions about avalanches, landslides, glacier melt.... In the subsequent conversion of the laser scanning files into a digital image (rendering), human building constructions as well as vegetation are eliminated, so that only the pure terrain topography is visible (with traces of paths and roads). These terrain images could be views of the earth after the disappearance of man. They are supernatural surface reliefs and apparent state of the earth in reduced, digital b/w representation. Due to the installation in space, the double-sided printing and the translucency of the material, slight inaccuracies or shifts arise in the superimposition of these found, spatially appearing valley and mountain structures. They play with the moment of irritation, the uncertainty of perception, make us think of earthquake-like tremors and create an unreal "science fiction" image in which pictorial space and real space merge. The human constructions that are missing from the image flags reappear as sculptural settlements in the spatial installation. Chunks of concrete with rebar, evidence of civilization in the geological layers of the earth, exemplary legacies of man. The "Tour du Monde a la voile" (Round the Wold Sailing Tour) opens up a field of tension between utopia and dystopia, from the positive image of circumnavigation as an individual, metaphorical appropriation of the world, to the real man-made destruction.
Felizitas Diering, Director FRAC Alsace, Sélestat 2020