Modern social life has melted into a plethora of landscapes in which everything about immediate life
has merged into a simple semblance. It is out of this personal observation that I created my series
"Moving Landscapes" in 2021. The place and situation in which I place these moving landscapes is the
church and the mass. The togetherness at mass is the opposite of the distance that is imposed on us
to protect us from the virus.
Distance is one of the greatest challenges of our time for the human being, for body, mind and soul
and for the historical landscape of the social environment of the 'Silent Majority'. The individual who
stands apart from society experiences distance as exclusion, vacuum and as an abyss experienced as
control and acquiescence, separation and loneliness. In the greatest contrast, let us imagine what
remains of the hoped-for fusion and harmony at a church mass today by "please keep 2 metres
away". This contrast reveals distance as a more intense and deeper enslavement than religion itself.
At this time, "distance" undoubtedly re-marks social relations between people.
For formative development - especially of the young - distance and the avoidance of contact is a
black hole with an unnamable and little-known gravity. In interpersonal relationships, the
withdrawing effect of emotional gravity takes away a person's physicality. Yet its force remains
strong and impressive, but detached from the learning experience of socialisation and its natural
borderlining. Does this gravitational force in the pandemic landscape mean that the human being
forgets/forgets to feel the other human being? At the same time, do humans also become
indistinguishable from the world around them? Do people become more equal without the creative
expression of the individual in togetherness? This change in social behaviour can be seen as a tragic
consequence of the Anthropocene: People are integrated into the environment, but without social
friction.
But is there perhaps a chance that distance will become a corrective through which man adapts to
nature and its natural laws? - Will he learn in the pandemic and get along with other living beings
after the pandemic, when he will then measure and try out his own instincts anew on and in society?
Will intimacy and distance, love and egocentricity then form differently than before the pandemic?
In my personal perception, distance is just creating a canyon that is subject to crustal movements,
forming new folds and seemingly changing its shape; but, like a liar, it begins to lie to itself because it
only circles within itself. With my Moving Landscapes, I want to explore this phenomenon of the
material and the immaterial, the direct and the indirect, the integration and the distance.
