About the purpose of killing
In
this suite of works, Dräxler approaches the arctic landscape as a
cultural phenomenon and considers the ways in which a greater force
holds the power to structure its outcomes: to decide who or what can
live, and by extension, what must perish in order to maintain its
planned or so-called natural order. Hunting is one of the earliest
practices to distinguish humans from animals, both in respect of the
elaborate tools developed for the sole purpose of killing other beings,
and the complexity of man’s strategies used in the hunt. In contrast to
animals, human’s notions of spirituality, habitus, the tendency to
glorify violence, and the desire to reinforce our own dominance over the
natural world play a role.
The artist as hunting goddess
Following
experienced hunter Matti Keränen through the snowy landscape of Lapland
as he makes his way across its vast expanse on cross-country skis, the
film tracks his movements much like a hunter stalks its prey. The artist
describes this as a filmic act of empathy with the performative aspects
of hunting: the silence of tracking, the acceleration of the hunter’s
breath when he sights his target, the concentration needed to aim, the
emptiness after the shot. Dräxler’s role in the film is that of an
oracle – a guide to the game – who like Diana, the Roman goddess of the
hunt, determines its fate. Through this influence over the success or
failure of the hunt, the artist positions herself in relation to the
work of sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour. His thesis is that the
separation of nature and culture, as well as that between people and
things, is non-existent. In Latour’s view, the introduction of this
distinction characterizes modernity; however, it also creates an
asymmetry between technology and society.
Media controlling the production of landscape
Such
asymmetry can be felt throughout the exhibition. Not only has the
nature/culture divide lef tsubliminal traces in the film’s scenes of
snow-covered forests, but filming itself took place near Posio, about an
hour and a half away from the Russian border, at the end of January
2022 – only weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The work was
partially shot with a drone, scanning the landscape from above in
similar fashion to a military reconnaissance mission, in turn
reinforcing the eerie foreshadowing of the shoot’s location. In its
first installation at Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim, Dräxler has created
an immersive environment using artificial ground fog, which swirls around
the projected film images and encompasses the viewer. In this way, the
artist replicates a common feature of the Finnish landscape – imitating
nature at will. The spaces of the Kunstverein were thus transformed into
an interface of nature and culture, through which the artist points to
the powerful ways that media imagery controls the production of
landscape.
