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From Landscapes to Projection Drama

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00644

1537-9477

A. Wagner, Philip Cluff,

Ecology, Conservation, and Geographical Studies

Based in the Austrian Alps, Antoine Wagner is a Franco-American photographer and video installation artist whose work engages mythological and narrative interpretations of nature. After studying theatre and political science at Northwestern University, Wagner completed a summer residency program at the Watermill Center, and later worked for filmmaker Michael Haneke, whose cinematographer, Darius Khondji, Wagner considers to be an important mentor. Over the years, Wagner’s artistic practice has also included film, opera, sculpture, and drawing. His many exhibitions have been held across Europe, North America, and Asia, including the Collection Lambert in Avignon, Hamburg’s Museum am Rothenbaum, the Stedelijk Museum Breda, the National Gallery of Armenia, and Tokyo’s Goethe-Institut. Wagner has also collaborated with classical musicians including pianist David Fray and Le Concert d’Astrée, led by conductor Emmanuelle Haïm. His latest installations, derived from his digital platform Impossible Forest, project large-scale images of trees and landscapes onto urban spaces. The first in-person Impossible Forest event was the virtual reality installation Umstellung, which was presented in June 2020 at Galerie Untitled 1983 in Geneva. Silva Improbabilis, a second installation derived from Impossible Forest, was presented on October 2, 2021, with Wagner projecting his forest images onto the façade of the National Archives in Paris for the twentieth edition of Nuit blanche, the city’s all-night arts festival. Wagner says that his modular artforms have evolved from simple sound and video installations into what he now calls projection drama—a nod to the many “music dramas” composed by his great-great-grandfather, Richard Wagner, whose Die Walküre he recently staged in part at the New World Center in Miami, and whose Parsifal inspired the video installation ATEM (2022), which debuted at the Tiroler Festspiele in Erl, Austria. Wagner first met writer Philip Cluff facing Silva Improbabilis. They spoke over Zoom the following week on October 11, 2021.The Editors■What was the inspiration behind Impossible Forest?Impossible Forest is as an online platform I created during the first months of the pandemic when I was confined in the Catskills. At first, I bought a drone—I’m used to traveling every month, so I wasn’t seeing the earth from above anymore. I started testing the drone’s physical limits by flying it as far as I could to nearby mountain tops, many that I’d never visited before. I did this all as a way of traveling. At the time, some of the trees were leafless and others were still covered by snow. This gave the images a monochrome quality. In the end, I was keeping a daily record of a forest that was impossible for me to reach. That was the initial idea—a landscape beyond my reach. My subject matter has always been nature, but I used to be focused on mountains and water—though I once made a series that examined anthropomorphic shapes found in the tree bark in Yakushima, Japan, in the oldest cedar trees of the world. I found screaming faces, details of an eye, out of which I made a series of heliographic images.By April 2020, I was reaching out to friends, artists, and musicians over Zoom. I wanted to see their natural surroundings (Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, and elsewhere) and asked them to send me anthropomorphic shapes they found in their nearby forests. I started collecting these images that, for me, explore how we personify and characterize aspects of the natural world. Within a week, I had made calls to people in about fifteen countries, and soon I had a collage of trees from nearly every continent. So this growing archive sparked the idea to create a kind of ecosystem that could only live in a digital environment.After that, I contacted Jules Estevez, a graphic designer based in England. He collaborated with me in building the Impossible Forest website. By that time, Brian Eno had come out with an album called Mixing Colors, which had a very simple website that read something like: “I can’t travel. I can’t shoot my music videos. So upload your videos and we’ll create a montage to illustrate my album.” So I would say that Eno provided the real blueprint of the Impossible Forest platform. Yet it all started with a collection of trees. I wanted to translate the project into something people can experience in the real world once this digital screen mania is over. Has the work changed your relationship with nature, in terms of how you spend your time interacting with the landscape? Do trees now dominate your conscience in a way they didn’t a year ago?My relationship with trees has definitely evolved. I see them as sculptures, but also as friends, mentors, other beings. Sitting in the woods of the Catskills, with little to no social interaction, only the trees kept me sane. I was confronted with a similar feeling (or reality) once before when I did a series in Alaska and Iceland that explored silence—I was interested in how silence serves as the rhythm, or heartbeat, of music. With regard to film, Jean Renoir once noted that in the typical twenty-four frames per second there is always a dark frame between the color images. In that absence, according to Renoir, is the magic of cinema. In terms of Silva Improbabilis, the projection onto the National Archives began at 7:30 p.m., while it was still daylight. So I cut the projection and left only the sound on. For the first thirty minutes, it was a very minimal but loud sound installation—a composition of sounds that I had recorded in the forest. It looped two or three times before nightfall. I think the synesthesia was felt long before we restarted the projection. What sounds were used?For the first act, I worked with Oliver Wennink from the London-based electronic band Anaphase. We used my recordings from Yakushima to build a soundtrack that exposed the anxiety of a hurt forest, a body that is seeking our help. I had placed stethoscopes on tree bark—with the wind blowing, a certain rhythm emerged that was engaging, hypnotic. The second act is a very simple 808 filter SOS in morse code. It was paired with the montage of what appears to be tight eyes and screaming mouths. We were saying that the forest is calling out for our help, but the only way to preserve nature is through communication. And the most universal language I could think of is music. I worked with a pianist from New Zealand, Jonathan Crayford, who specializes in scoring documentaries. I wanted the recording to be a very loose, informal, and personal composition. I said, “Look at these trees, look at this montage and improvise in C-flat.” His piece was very minimal and spacious, which breathed between the notes. The third act is a reversed game of musical chairs set to Jonathan’s improvisations in which performers sit during the music and stand in silence. When I saw the installation with you, the first thing you told me was that you were going to move it to Austria. How would relocating this work change the way that you feel about it and see it?The piece is about land preservation. Impossible Forest is an itinerant and modular work that feeds off of each new tree that is uploaded to the platform. In Paris, it was sensational to have the National Archives as the starting point of the installation, to have the forest projected onto the facade of this particular building. It constituted a dialogue between nature and the archive. Nature felt both present and in the future, a hologram hovering over the records of our past. I think that the backdrop is essential to the work. We had a projection that was around one hundred by sixty yards. But it can adapt to landmarks around the world. I believe that this work can grow and evolve—a forest, an ecosystem that blooms and adapts. Really, the notion of “the impossible” continues to play a big part in the work, fueling this challenge to find some pragmatic way to be in dialogue with urban spaces and landmarks around the world. I wish I could have captured a bird’s eye view of the city of Paris that day, because October 2 was the last night of the Arc de Triomphe’s being wrapped by Christo. He helped me, I think, as his work had been ongoing for two weeks by then, in preparing the audience for this kind of monumental, impossible project that challenges any kind of reason. It felt like he was there in Paris, and I felt lucky to be part of part of some unnamed city-wide group show. Christo’s reach for the impossible is an important influence on my work. Likewise, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s use of architecture as a canvas helped guide the development of what I am calling “projection drama,” a site-specific form governed by a consideration of dramatic effectiveness in natural environments rather than working in traditional theatrical space. Land artists from the sixties and seventies like Robert Smithson and Donald Judd were also important to me in helping conceptualize the harmony of art and nature.These trees are petrified. Is there something in you that was petrified by the installation? Or was there any irreversible change that came with doing this work?It’s interesting that you use the word “irreversible,” because everything these days feels reversed or inverted or negative, and I’ve always been very close to analog media. All of my photography had been on film, and moving images had always been eight-millimeter or sixteen-millimeter. But I’ve recently embraced digital forms. I think I have managed to find a balance between using digital imagery as a tool without losing the beauty of nature, which was always my biggest fear in drawing upon these crisp, computerized images. But here it really felt like a mission accomplished, a moment of relief. It felt very personal, yet global. What does your daily life look like now?I was upstate for the first six months of the pandemic and then I moved my family to Austria. We are in Tyrol in the middle of the mountains—the closest city is about thirty minutes away. My daily routine consists of walking in the woods, feeling the fresh air, trying to explore new paths, new hikes, new peaks. I now have a studio in an old factory that allows me to experiment with the materials that I gather in the forests and work on my sculpture. I pick up dirt, leaves, pinecones. These elements are very personal to me, as is the water from the streams. I’ve been to a university near here in order to look at the bacteria through microscopes, analyzing the minerals, really attempting to engage our micro- and macro-relationships to nature. That’s another part of how the digital has come into my life. I record things every day, I archive things every day. I could never have enough film to do this kind of documentation. My method in the past was inflected by city life punctuated by a project photographing a set of mountains or trees. So my process has become a lot less of a hunt and more of an ongoing process, and it definitely feels like the studio is right there—it’s outside, everywhere.