CINEMATIC
LANDSCAPE
EXCHANGE
Title: Counter-Attractions
Name: Eleni Gkotzaridi
Sound: Drinking Age - Cameron Winter, You Never Came - Grouper
Voiceover: Eleni Gkotzaridi
The landscape is a surface on which people have historically projected their desires. From the initial cartographic lunar drawings to American Romantic landscape paintings, emerging after the European expansion westward into the Americas. Both representations of landscapes were created with the intention of accurately recording yet revealed the subjects’ projection of their own desire onto the landscape; one of occupation and appropriation.
New Mexico is a microcosm of this phenomenon, with different agents establish their own narrative surrounding the landscape, projecting their own desire. New Mexico has been dubbed the “Land of Enchantment,” “Wild West,” “Home of the UFOs...” yet underneath all this is a land which has belonged to native peoples for generations. This contrast between the conflicting narratives layered on the land, is revealed in the materiality of structures which advertise and define New Mexico as “Alien land” or “The Land of Enchantment.” Tall, colourful, flashy, exaggerated and eye-catching.
Given that one experiences New Mexico, largely through the act of driving, this project proposes a route starting in Albuquerque, which takes viewers around a set of landmarks or attractions scattered around the state. These appear through images on postcards and expose the absurdity and disingenuous nature of these narratives layered onto the landscape. The giant scale and absurdity of the proposed landmarks parallel the absurdity of what's been inflicted on the land underneath. Because the structures are so exaggerated, the narrative collapses into itself, revealing itself as a mechanism rather than a true definition of the land.
Name: Eleni Gkotzaridi
Sound: Drinking Age - Cameron Winter, You Never Came - Grouper
Voiceover: Eleni Gkotzaridi
The landscape is a surface on which people have historically projected their desires. From the initial cartographic lunar drawings to American Romantic landscape paintings, emerging after the European expansion westward into the Americas. Both representations of landscapes were created with the intention of accurately recording yet revealed the subjects’ projection of their own desire onto the landscape; one of occupation and appropriation.
New Mexico is a microcosm of this phenomenon, with different agents establish their own narrative surrounding the landscape, projecting their own desire. New Mexico has been dubbed the “Land of Enchantment,” “Wild West,” “Home of the UFOs...” yet underneath all this is a land which has belonged to native peoples for generations. This contrast between the conflicting narratives layered on the land, is revealed in the materiality of structures which advertise and define New Mexico as “Alien land” or “The Land of Enchantment.” Tall, colourful, flashy, exaggerated and eye-catching.
Given that one experiences New Mexico, largely through the act of driving, this project proposes a route starting in Albuquerque, which takes viewers around a set of landmarks or attractions scattered around the state. These appear through images on postcards and expose the absurdity and disingenuous nature of these narratives layered onto the landscape. The giant scale and absurdity of the proposed landmarks parallel the absurdity of what's been inflicted on the land underneath. Because the structures are so exaggerated, the narrative collapses into itself, revealing itself as a mechanism rather than a true definition of the land.
