Drifting as a process and as a result | Collective Synops | NAC 2013

Published on Tuesday, 10 September 2013 19:23

Collective Synops’s work for the Critical Tourism residency is the creation of a blog that is uploaded from Switzerland and Lithuania for all the month of August 2013. This blog is a platform where the Collective’s members can share their impressions and their experiences about the place where they are and their status as inhabitant and tourist, through their artistic practice.

The Collective is travelling from different positions, both geographically and conceptually and then was really inspired by the concept of drifting - drifting places, points of view, concepts, scales. Drifting in all these situations is a way to observe, research and built a project, as well as a way to stand back.

The blog is constructed with several projects investigating questions regarding the cultural landscapes, the point of view, the temporality, the codes of the maps. This research materializes itself in the production of works realised with various mediums such as pictures, drawings and videos. The blog is visible on this link: www.synops.ch

Maëlle’s research is mainly based on the drifting dunes issue. She deconstructs the astonishing visual impact of this landscape through understanding the processes of its creation. Her project is then to reinterpret them, showing how the Curonian Spit isn’t a wild space but a constructed one, through a combination of nature processes and long time human interventions. Then she mainly focuses on how to rebuild these phenomena and how to give clues to the viewer to understand these processes. She also works on how the typical is constructed both in Nida or in Wallis through the restaging of former houses: a collection of façades.

For the Nida Art Colony residency the question of the point of view is the main concept developped by Stéphanie. Whether on a map, on a bike, on Google Maps or by foot, Stephanie works on perceptions of places, which we know or we discover by using rhythm, temporality and codes. The issue of perception is important and raises questions about changing the impressions depending on the context. Interested in new media and their ability to exchange information, her work plays on the déjà vu either by the loops of her videos or aesthetic familiar images - a fantasized collective memory lived through the experience of the others.