Land
2006
Installation, 00:08:00.
Materials: video
Collection: National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (Inv. no. 603/08).
In Stefanos Tsivopoulos’ Land, the viewer watches three men of different nationalities who wake up on a rocky beach. Like castaways, they begin to wonder out loud, each in his own language, about the land in which they ended up stranded. The camera is gradually revealing parts of this land to eventually disclose, unexpectedly, to the viewer that this place is in fact an uninhabitable desert island. Its only three non-indigenous inhabitants are attempting to describe it notionally with their questions: “What is the name of this place? Who owns this place? Can this territory be defined topographically and geographically or is it like a vacuum?”. Being something between a tragicomic episode and a philosophical video essay on the notional qualities of a place, Land reframes important timeless questions about territory, borders and population shifts.
- Stamatis Schizakis, EMST