The international symposium Frontiers of Solitude, organized as part of the eponymous art project site will offer a comparison of the opinions, experiences, and points of view of artists, curators, and invited guests on the theme of transitions in the landscape in which we currently live and of which we are a part.
The symposium searches for relationships between the cultural, political, and economic aspects of contemporary concepts and our understandings of what is meant by such words as Earth, countryside, landscape, and land, including the topography of transitional zones, with an eye on both establishing and crossing over boundaries and limitations.
The term landscape can be understood as a mindset to orient us in the world and to reflect our relationship with the land. It is everywhere around us, under our feet; it is our shared starting point; it is that which at once unites and separates us. With this in mind, we can begin to raise questions about what is happening to the land? How are we connected to it, how do we relate to it, what separates us from it? How and to what extent can we understand the land, and what do we all know and not know about it? To whom does it belong, and how do we change it, for better or worse?
The artist, architect, businessman, technician, scientist, farmer, pilgrim and other kind of specialist each perceive the landscape in their own terms. How can we express and capture in human, rather than statistical, terms, both the visible and invisible transformations that the land undergoes, both locally and globally, with regard to the entire biosphere and climate?
Industrialization brings about mobility of people and goods, hyper-connectivity, overproduction and urbanization, which have transformed a large part of the 21st-century landscape into an industrial concourse, test laboratory, and a field of conflict among people, and between people and other living creatures. From this, there comes about a blurring of existing, seemingly well-defined borders, zones both separate and interconnected, with regions of safety and danger, rich and poor, managed and wild.
Have we already entered an ideosphere of beyond imaginary boundaries? Does contemporary art make it possible to orient ourselves within this unstable and ever-changing territory? Do frequent art projects and festivals, or interdisciplinary symposium on the theme of the Anthropocene offer fresh approaches and visions, or rather exploit the fascination and anxiety as result of the expected and unexpected changes and transformations?
Frontiers of Solitude symposium was held on 5th and 6th of February 2016 in French Institute of Prague
http://frontiers-of-solitude.org
