Where will the conflict we have started against our natural host lead us ?

NATURA UMANA

Jeremie Arpa

6’53” animation video

 

Combining 3D visuals and sound capture, «Natura Umana» depicts the discord created by the co-existence of the Natural Organic and the Industrial Geometric. The motion picture’s linear narrative guides the viewer through the essence of this conflict’s key player by interweaving different scales of intrusion into his domain.

The cubic shape represents a distinct manifestation of the conflict generated by human activity on the Earth’s natural surface. Being untraceable in the wilderness, the cube has colonised Nature through human hands, which have duly denied their own organic curves. We have covered our planet’s landscapes with these cuboids in order to organise, divide, optimise and exploit the space. This thirst for exploitation fueled by the capitalist rush of our society has brought us into competition with our organic host. The Cubic Man has penetrated wild lands with his industrial structures, which solely serve the functioning of his human system in its angular tangle of power and profit. As a result of this carnal relationship, today’s landscapes display the fusion of two worlds, the Geometric Industrial merging with theOrganic Natural.

The Cubic Man being the friction point of this conflict, he produced «Natura Umana» armed with his technologies in order to share his own portrait on our cubic screens, in our cubic homes and in the hope of solving our problems through our cubic way of thinking.

A project made in the course

Reading Landscapes: Sites, Representation and Histories of Contested Spaces

How do we understand and represent landscape today, almost 50 years after the famous “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” show at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York? The Guardian discusses this influential exhibition, in a review from 2010, as a show that rewrote the rules of landscape photography back in 1975. The works on display saw landscape for the first time strongly as man-made, as transformed, and contested spaces, against the tradition of nature photography that Ansel Adams and Edward Weston aspired to, which aimed to envision nature as an eternal, untouched place of contemplation. Contemporary artists and theorists like T.J.
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