Untitled (monochrome)
text print, 29,7 x 21 cm, 2010

The text on the A4 sheet of Untitled (Monochrome) evokes a white landscape that extends into a conceptual, boundless space. The white space functions as a paradox: simultaneously present and absent, appearing and disappearing, an image shaped by what it does not contain.

The text emerged intuitively in 2008, and was titled in early 2010. I provided the work without a contextual statement for exhibition and publication. What followed were divergent written and spoken interpretations. The work resists interpretation while simultaneously inviting it — it opened a reflective space in which one can explore what cannot, or not fully, be interpreted. Rereading is part of the work. Each reading, including this one, is just one.

A few years later, I read Ecology without Nature by Timothy Morton. In it, Morton defines 'ecomimesis'1 as an aesthetic strategy that suggests a direct, sensory experience of environment — an attempt to erase the distance between subject and surroundings. The subject who says "I am immersed in nature"2 contradicts itself: the moment the 'I' speaks, it stands outside the experience it claims to be undergoing. This contradiction, Morton argues, is not trivial, but reveals 'nature' as an ideologically charged concept — a separate, pure domain. Since it is always the subject that names, perceives or experiences this separation, it inevitably remains part of every ecological relation. According to Morton, an ecology without nature is conceivable; but an ecology without a subject, is undesirable.

Where 'ecomimesis' attempts to dissolve the distance between subject and environment, that distance unfolds in Untitled (Monochrome). The subject says: "I am standing in the middle of a vast landscape," only to reveal that this description is a lie, offered for the reader's sake.The truth is that the distance is so vast that every attempt at positioning fails. Yet the subject is present: it observes and speaks.

Untitled (Monochrome) can be read as a shared space of experience in which the meaning of 'environment' emerges and withdraws. It dissolves the illusion of an 'out there' giving way to a scale that exceeds the scope of direct perception — something that, in this context, touches on the ungraspable scale of planetary shifts such as global warming. The disorientation and uncertainty prompted by the absence of reference points are not signs of failure, but necessary conditions for observation.

The current rise in authoritarian tendencies feeds on a reified idea of a 'natural' order—one that does not align with the dynamic and interwoven fabric of ecological reality. It makes clear that allowing for uncertainty and ambiguity is anything but self-evident. The human psyche is poorly equipped for it. But art endures it. Through intuitive ways of knowing, art attunes us to what we cannot contain.

1 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), passim.
2 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 182.