Imaginary Ecologies
Wandering through the forests on the lookout for encounters, I come upon a multitude of things and beings with which we share the same ground. Woods, grasses, fungi, bones, stones have existed in complex relationships with each other since infinite times, independent of our human perception. But to relate to and to imagine these forces seems to have never been so difficult and has immediate consequences for the health of the planet. From the perspective of the ecological crisis, it is now clear that our relationship to the environment is outdated and that new understandings need to be established for a sustainable future. By opening up an imaginary perspective, and actively looking out for other beings of the phenomenal world, a broad willingness for dialogue opens up. In my work, I participate in the endless relations of beings and objects I find. From these encounters I create photographic spaces to imaginarily engage in a more-than-human world and to re-search the common embeddedness of all potential beings.
https://www.martintscholl.com/imaginary-ecologies/
Imaginary Ecologies
published by The Eriskay Connection (2024)
A significant part of the work of artistic researcher Martin Tscholl (DE) involves walking through meadows, forests, and mountains. Here, he encounters a web of interconnections that extends far beyond the realm of humans. This web is inhabited by a wide variety of organisms, materials, and processes that are mutually dependent and in permanent change. By actively looking out for these other beings a correspondence between the human and the non-human spheres starts to unfold. In this process the apparent opposites of the rational and irrational, life and non-life, art and nature, converge. Tscholl’s photography allows us to recognise the silent fragments of nature as being different from us, but also as originating from the same ontological ground.
Photography: Martin Tscholl
Text: Martin Tscholl
Design: Rob van Hoesel
Lithography: Sebastiaan Hanekroot (Colour&Books)
Production: Jos Morree (Fine Books)
Print: NPN Printers (NL)
Binding: Patist (NL)
225 × 308 mm
240 pages
English
Hardcover
First edition: 1000
9789083357157
Fading Lines
As impressive natural phenomena in high mountain landscapes, glaciers are such places where the consequences of climate change can clearly be witnessed. Carbon emissions produced by human intervention are inscribing themselves deeply into our environments and causing entire glacier landscapes to disappear. The biophysical, economic, and political evidence on glacier shrinkage has so far masked the challenges to human self-understanding of our immediate environment and, by extension, to our self-reliance. Yet glacier landscapes are also places that have inscribed themselves as aesthetic experiences in human cultural memory with the discovery of the sublime. „Fading Lines“ paves a sensual component towards the sublime character of glaciers in Norway and Switzerland.
Terrain
„In Terrain Martin Tscholl re-frames our view of nature, which consists of endless interrelations between phenomena. Structure is imposed through photography to reconnect these elusive and separated entities. The work question our own assumptions and experiences of nature in both a play-off and order of two (or more) images.“
– Bruun Rasmussen, Auctioneers of Fine Art, Copenhagen, Denmark –
