FOREST TIME - FROM LOCATION TO THE IDEA OF RELATION * 2010 * AGNIESZKA A. WOŁODŹKO
Today’s techno-science civilization that reflects our everlasting conviction that man as master of the world is able to capture the totality of beings is disclosed in its superficiality by Katharina D. Martin. Forest Time expresses the need to bring to the world its dynamic, relational character, with and in which we are mutually connected. It indicates thus a place as having the worldly character, relational, which we can encounter not through mathematical, geographical description but through actual involvement. This particular act of leaving, habiting in the place as relational spatiality becomes prior to any rational, universal description. Forest Time shows the world where we are already thrown to it and already involved with things. Through things thus Forest Time not only rejects the binary oppositions between mind-body, vision-touch, thing-art, real-metaphorical, object-subject as an old dichotomies, but reveal that we can understand ourselves and our place as mutually related being.
Katharina D. Martin reveals the situatedness of our being through dealing with things in Forest Time. Video itself, as although moving, still flat screen, remains to be something which is there, far from the tactile reality. Exhibited in the gallery space things bring back the remoteness of the video into its tactile situatedness. Such presence of a thing, cannot be though treated as an object of our cognition with regard to which we are entirely separated. Situatedness, which things strengthened, means the meaningful, dynamic spatiality in which we find ourselves as leaving and tactile, thus, connected to things.
This text is an abstract of the paper Forest time - From Location to the Idea of Relation by Text by Dr. Agnieszka A. Wołodźko Lecturer cultural disciplines at Leiden University