Land ( Valid until 30 June 2010 – Day 63- Day 56)
Lippard describes the ‘land’ as neither place nor landscape nor property. Land, for Lippard, is a distinctive spatial and spiritual element as well as the raw material for habitation and ‘use. She categorise the land in three divisions: physical land, metaphorical land and ideological land. I want to extended this and discuss a bit about how this divisions are especially visible on the female body and through the digital screen. It is an amazing potentially of the digital media, to articulate the layers of what land is through the screen. By translating the physicality into 1 and 0, and hybrids between real and immaterial surfaces, Google Maps are example about how we assemble everyday motion on screen by digitalising data. The routes are calculated, shortest and fastest options are generated, images and videos are attached to streets and parks, histories are reinstated, and personal stories are overlooked. The land through GoogleMaps becomes territory that is easily conquerable (you can get directions from Northampton, East Midlands to Istres, South France in a second), transferable surface that can be explored through different perspectives and angles (as part of GoogleEarth you can explore properties, building, parks, and corners), and finally a (in)visible battleground of public/private debate (the level of information of what is available is strictly reinforcing the East/West, South/North division).
Walking is a connection between the women and the land. Walking is a form of meditation. Motion allows a certain mental freedom that translates land to a person kinaesthetically. “Walking is the only way to measure the rhythm of the body against the rhythm of the land.” Writes Rebecca Solnit. When I was walking, says Lippard, I began to perceive places as spatial metaphors for temporal distance. Women, when alone with nature, are subject to particularly contradictory experience, liberating on one hand, threatening on the other. There is another predator out there: exhilarating sensual identification with landforms and processes is countered by social fear and oppression. (Lippard 1997, p.14) . In my work, I use the act of walking to access the land and my relationship with it, whether it is physical, metaphorical or ideological.
M is calling me from Düsseldorf. He is thrilled; he just got a new phone with GPS. It early 2006, and the GPS as consistent part of mobile phones is just coming out. We are getting ready to drive to Croatia, to a small island of Mljet (isolated refugee in the Adriatic) for our summer holiday. A bit worried that we have to cross Kosovo, but M reassures me that with our GPS we can go to the end of the world and back.
He is back in Skopje, we are getting packed. We go on a local ride to try our GPS. Suddenly the screen is almost blank, there are satellites, but there is no data that our road, our city, our country exists. We are in the middle of a buzzing city, and our screen is empty as a lonely field. Our land, our motherland, our apartment, our illusion does not exists, is not recognised by the technology, is not translated into the data. It is a blank field on the world map, a place that should rather disappear. How our land history is translated into data? Who is making the choice?
