Orphan Lands, 2003

This exhibition combines a miniature cast aluminum landscape with various digital and analog film media. Using interactive mapping of a piece of actual land in Brazil that is sealed off for nuclear waste, the viewers can navigate the film according to area specific-GIS information. This digital publication with maps and GIS was online until 2015.

Super 16mm film transferred to HD video, 7 minute loop. Installation in an 9'x 18' insulated environment. Cast aluminum landscape model 30"x 30". Exhibited at the 8th Havana Biennale, Cuba; The Greatest Show On Earth, Metropole Gallery, Folkestone, United Kingdom.

An area of land is sealed off for mysterious reasons and becomes a metaphor for a contaminated body, both radiated in similar biochemical processes.

In this multimedia installation, a delineated expanse of terrain serves as an evocative metaphor for a biologically compromised body, both subjected to analogous biochemical processes of radiation and contamination. The visual narrative unfolds through a cinematic technique, where the camera languidly traverses a landscape marred by desolation and abandonment, a space irrevocably altered by the aftermath of nuclear fallout. This land, now a veritable palimpsest of environmental degradation, unveils a visceral wound projected to endure for an astonishing span of two hundred millennia. While the biochemical processes have visibly scarred the surface, the subterranean layers retain an unsettling preservation of their historical and ecological narratives. The corporeal and the terrestrial are thus defiled, stripped of their erstwhile vitality and aesthetic allure.

Drawing inspiration from Susan Griffin's seminal work, "A Chorus of Stones - The Private Life of War," the installation engages with the concept of 'orphan lands,' a term coined by local communities to denote public terrains that unidentified agencies have inexplicably cordoned off. Griffin's text serves as an intellectual underpinning for the project, illuminating the enigmatic power dynamics that render these spaces as zones of exclusion and contamination. The installation, therefore, not only interrogates the physical and ethical dimensions of environmental and bodily harm but also delves into the sociopolitical mechanisms that perpetuate such states of forsakenness and decay.