Reports

Virgin Forest

The exhibition stands on the border between art and journalism. It is just as much political activism as a purely poetic appeal to retain our relationship with wild and untouched nature. Using the results from his research conducted at a forestry school, Cobilanschi draws attention to the stereotypes that exist in our thinking. His aim is to initiate a discussion about the relationship between forests and capitalism.

In his journalism practice, Claudiu Cobilanschi adopts a certain agitation method; then, as an artist, he crosses media boundaries and presents to his audience the entirety and complexity of an issue in relation to himself as a human. His works thus remain very personal and, just on the basis of their nature, almost physical activism to achieve a utopian word, which is in fact unattainable. He expands a discussion about socio-political problems, the main theme being the relationship between nature and capitalism.

artistsClaudiu Cobilanschi
curatorsNikola Brabcová, Karin Šrubařová
placePrototyp
tags
castClaudiu Cobilanschi
cameraJan Vidlička
soundJan Vidlička
editingJan Vidlička
interviewJan Vidlička
categoryReports
published9. 11. 2016
languageČesky / English
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Virgin Forest
The group exhibition presents works in different media by emerging artists from Czech Republic, Poland and Germany that refer to folk and indigenous traditions, beliefs and crafts, magical thinking and animism, using the language of poetry, speculative theories and storytelling. Using these various approaches and narratives the artists explore topics related to letting go, unlearning, loss or mourning in the context of the individual and collective traumas.
The final outcome from the workshop was to be a personal documentary from the location. I asked the tractor train driver to move the train in front of my camera. The train offered some amazing views of the museum. And that etude with a dog in the street at the end of the video happened completely by chance. I filmed and edited the video directly in the camera. Via my walkman I added background music that blared over the museum outdoor loudspeakers. A report on the museum park was created that did not feature any actual events, places or real people. No video could match the intensity of the experience though.
The concept of the exhibition is based on the ideological convergence of the work of Catherine Radosa and Jaroslav Varga, which consists in revealing the physical and symbolic traces of the past. Both artists examine these relics of bygone times and eras from the perspective of collective memory and the mechanisms of its storage. A vacant lot is an empty space, a gap left by a past situation that can be filled again. The installation Colonne / Révolution captures the constant cycle of the monument in a triple projection. The period of the revolutionary Paris Commune is still a problematic period in France, similar to the period of socialism in our country: it has been and continues to be reinterpreted, tabooed, or marginalized.