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| © Jane and Louise Wilson, Atomgrad (Nature Abhors A Vacuum) I, 2010 |
The body of work brought together by the Wilson twins, Jane and Louise, under the name Atomgrad (Nature Abhors A Vacuum) (2010), can be perceived as a journey about poetic inheritance. It represents an open possible succession to what we gave up. But though that body of work insists on the inevitabilities it portrays, it ends with an offering; it ends, as though coming from nowhere, with the possibility of freedom. As though abandonment is stronger than naming. What has been proposed is simply a breaking of the cycle. What do you do after you break it up? Because the only thing that it is affirmed is the giving up!
Those are pictures of spaces of transition. They record a particular moment in time, concerned with the relation between experience, absence and presence; the camera captures empty, neglected spaces going through the process of changing from one particular condition to another. It evokes consciousness and phenomenological journeys that associate and explore archaeological sites – related with sites that no longer exist – and experiences relating humankind historic memory, how to influence and construct memories and desires, while representing acts of giving up something with relative value for the sake of something else, which can be regarded as more important or worthy. An abandonment movement intended to invalidate the thoughts we are immersed in while moving in to a new condition. Overall, we give up something to gain something. Those are photographs that identify humankind effort in filling space with something that determines what is, or the all-embracing activity of filling space with matter, with ideas, with meaning and conditions.
After being void of something what returns is a new essence. We acquire a new inherent quality that would influence the characteristics that determine what is the “historical specificity.” A singular shift that affects the cognitive action would allow us to read cultural narratives in the process of continuous translation and negotiation. “It does allow us to shift the burden of specificity from the material to the reader or viewer and prevents us from the dangers of complete dislocation,” as is expressed by Prof. Irit Rogoff, while adding, “a shift to a performative phase of cultural work, in which meaning takes place, takes place in the present rather than is excavated for.” She concludes, “[w]here its operations are not through signifying processes or through entering a symbolic order.” The vested basic features suffer a phenomenological transmutation, a change in the manifestation of difference. In particular, it allows the viewer to “perceive about the dynamics and performances of ambivalence and of disavowal in public sphere culture.”
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| © Jane and Louise Wilson, Atomgrad (Nature Abhors A Vacuum) VI, 2010 |
After being void of something, however, what returns is a new essence, beyond the before-and-after of an encounter. We acquire new inherent qualities, basic features, essential characters, or complexions. Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) brings us structures or buildings that are important in history, or potentially so – i.e. iconic spaces representing humanity historic progress, with the power to make a person to remember things expressing situations that are embodied through places, such as childhood in an kindergarten, learning in a classroom, performing in a theatre, or relaxing in a swimming pool, etc. Jane and Louise Wilson’s series of colour photographs capture derelict complex and carefully designed conceptual structure of something, with their logical organisation being retaken by nature.
The particularity of these visual registrations and measuring is that they are of disuse and neglect places that were not represented on maps, except in classified ones. The twin sisters record a sacrificial act happening in a particular moment in time. The space’s initial purpose or function is destroyed, and what arouses from these abandoned anonymous entities, belonging to a particular moment in the indefinite continued progress of existence, which are being giving up to a supernatural figure, is a entity with new basic features, a mixture between order, disorder and chaos. However, in the end, these abandoned places will continue to be anonymous entities, lost for naming in the public sphere, but are classified for history’s sake.
This giving up of something important or valued for the sake of other consideration can be regarded as a sacrificial act. It takes its form through a physical collective phenomenon caused and regulated by the world, by features and products of the earth (as opposed to human creations). A physical natural force that drives a deterritorialisation and get the space back in to the type of existence that was more in tune with what existed before the development of complex industrial and technological societies. But not to an old position; instead it brings a new one, a new position derived from the assortments between what is the abandonment of complex or carefully designed conceptual structure designer by man and what is aroused by nature. Atomgrad (Nature Abhors A Vacuum) are photographs of a lustful renunciation, a lascivious offering to please the being, with the strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen. It shows the ambivalence between man’s dependence on giving up historical narratives to provide material for consumption and the performative effect he has on the future of the planet, while highlighting the marks of nature intervention through time on the landscape created by man.
The dark tragedy of the space thrust on following an event that caused great suffering, destruction, and distress on a global scale – a new calamity in which it is still not possible to definitively determine what would be its consequences in to the natural world. Such serious cataclysm attracted and has been attracting individuals with strong feelings of wanting something, yearning for “opportunities to discover a secret world in ruins, one that might challenge existing certainties and provide liberating alternative,” as is expressed by the academic, Paul Dobraszczyk.
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| © Jane and Louise Wilson, Atomgrad (Nature Abhors A Vacuum) IV, 2010 |
Atomgrad refers to closed cities created throughout the Cold War, by the Soviet Union, and spread all over the country in locations not mapped or registered by any statistical data. Those military or scientific research places of residence (enclosed from by a security perimeter comprising fences of barbed wire and towers) much resemble a prison, a sheath with restrictions of access, of movement and of residence. In the Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) series, Jane and Louise Wilson photographed the town of Pripyat (evacuated a few days after Chernobyl disaster, in 26th April 1986), in present-day Ukraine. Pripyat was conceived as a modern soviet city, in the 1970s, housing Chernobyl nuclear facility workers and their families, when early in the morning of that tragic date, a series of explosions destroyed the building and reactor number four of the nuclear station, obliging its inhabitants to abandon it as soon as possible, leaving behind almost all belongings.
The same way that photographs of Pripyat’s ruins, and of another dark tourism destination place, “can be framed within the wider context of a long history of dystopian and post-apocalyptic representations of civilisation and its cities,” so do Jane and Louise Wilson’s series Atomgrad (Nature Abhors A Vacuum), as another aftermath of human induced atrocities. These are pictures of a site of a nuclear tragedy, with yardsticks (appearing in each individual photograph) suggesting the act of measuring both the space for radioactive levels and architecture structures, as is expressed by the photographers, as well as the logical organisation of time and being.
Visions of ruins, in particular from the modern industrial cities of the 19th century, arouse in the viewer a natural desire. In particular, this experience has, according to Dobraszczyk, “functioned as a counter-current to the dominant discourse of progress and improvement,” as well as of yearning and transgression. Giving up of something can be compared to, as is defined by the British psychotherapist and essayist Adam Phillips, an all too easily form of “spurious omniscience.” It is a relationship between a part and a whole as though when we gave up something we know too much: “we act as if we know far to more than we could – about what would happen if we keep it.” We give up for in order to free ourselves from certain things, and fake “an omniscience about the future” to the benefit of “thinking out alternatives.” Hence, and as Phillips puts it, “myths of decline are myths of progress inverted,” and ruins of established determined characteristics – historical specificity – become the premises on to which one starts to build the future.
The degree to which we know everything is ascertained by the deceptive sense one is able to give up for. Unusually, the invalidation of one’s own thought doesn’t offer the usual satisfying supposition of “thinking we know more about the experience we had then we know in reality.” But, instead, it allows to perceive the dynamics and performances of life’s ambivalences and the denial in facing this same perception, creating a simulated, an artificial knowledge of what might be what we did not experience, i.e., naming reality. Comparable, the risk, in a way, is that the omniscience about what one is giving up of – empty places, uncontrolled evacuated areas, remote and neglected spaces in Jane and Louise Wilson’s work – is matched by an omniscience about what one is getting out for. In the sense that we start ‘”from” a point in space indicated by the yardsticks (as suggesting the act of measuring space for radioactive levels and architecture structures, and the logical organisation of time and being), through a relationship expressed ‘of’ between an abandoned and given up spaces (visions of ruins, empty places, uncontrolled evacuated areas, remote and neglected spaces), which affects the thoughts we are immerse in (historical specificity).
“Chernobyl’s zone is a distinct geographical area that can be represented, but is, at the same time, a symbolic void for incommensurable loss. Its symbolic power derives from the unprecedented nature of the accident and the unknown nature of its consequences.” (Dobraszczyk, p. 374)
Giving up, in its various senses, refers to abandonment and loss and to artificiality correlations, bodily desires, and transgression. So, in our best effort, every attempt to give up of something is destined to fail because the giving up of something creates a vacuum. Nonetheless, as soon as we empty space of something, something else moves in to take its place. Even if that something is colourless, odourless air, as was expressed by Aristotles. Giving up of something may be a fortunate relief, but it may also be an inscrutable loss, an all-embracing white canvas ready to be filled with colours, forms, textures and smells, as when living in a loss at a refugee camp, for instance. Giving up can grow a comprehensive distinctiveness that refers to particular identifying marks and characters, i.e. the territorialisation of naming without moral restrains or political hindrances.
Bibliography:
Dobraszczyk, Paul (2010) Petrified Ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city, in ‘City: analysis of urban trends, culture theory, policy, action’, 14:4, 370-389, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2010.496190
Phillips, Adam (2013) Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. London: Penguin Books.
Rogoff, Irit (2006) ‘Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist?’, in Kein.org. Accessed February 26th, 2013.
Published at VASA Project: Where Do We Go Now! Part III - Jane and Louise Wilson.
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