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WAITING LAND



ONE IMAGE OF THE WORLD
Waiting Land is at once place and condition.  It manifests through poor spatial formations and low-res visuals.  It shows the actual landscape as the image of the world and what happens in it.  Over time, landscape has transformed from a specific and framed image or representation to an immersive rendering as an all encompassing ambience.  Our view of landscape has also expanded—not necessarily in precision (which, no doubt, would have been a desirable effect), but in a kaleidoscope-like manner.  Now, landscape combines narrations, media and technologies, generating speculation, orientation and information.  Waiting Land is an occasion to look at landscape in the ‘real’ world.


STUB
Waiting Land is a stub.  It’s an environment that stands in for some other functionality or place.  A stub can simulate both behavior and form.  It can follow a procedure.  It can temporarily substitute something yet to happen.  This stub is a testing ground: for the next natural onslaught, the next carcass to rise from oblivion, the inevitable amnesty, the transformation of concrete to gold—basic alchemy.  Envision this stub as the downright neutral environment of whatever survives.  All that exists here corresponds with and adapts to ever other challenges.  All resonates.  What we liberally ignored is actually shaping minds, landscapes and cities alike.  This stub is open-ended, nonspecific.  It’s forever becoming, never finished.  Everything here is collateral and tax-exempt at once.  There’s no program, no permit, no budget.  Its inhabitants are fictive.  This stub is the pseudocode for all possible evasive maneuvers.  It’s a simplified version of an ideal, to be more coherent.  It’s the informal operating principle to merge constructions, infrastructures, wilderness, and spontaneity into a single territory beyond surveillance or assessment.  It’s free from any and all responsibilities.


NEW DEAL
Waiting Land is only comprehensible as the consequence of sophisticated abstractions.  It is less a geographical location than a normative construct.  It is the projection of calculations, bylaws, fiscal regimes and evasions, delocalized policies and cadastral parcelling.  It results from the collusion between private interests and political gain, hinting at the New Deal of the Anthropocene (obviously reversing the Roosevelt original).  The original New Deal addressed the public.  But the public has moved on.  We all know it and we all consented to it.  So, Waiting Land epitomizes the two resident crises of our times, the environmental and the economic.  It could be said that free-range speculation and unbridled consumption are two sides of the same coin:  one generates the capital for the other.  These two phenomena, each in their own way, respond to excess and, in their boldness, are centerpieces of current cultural manifestations.  Yet they are also expressions of desire—a notion of politics that still has to engage in its vocabulary or mind set.


SQUATTER
Waiting Land is a story about humankind.  It’s simple:  what happens to the land and what happens to people is quite the same.  The story tells of placeholding by distinctly positioning ‘things’ into the landscape.  To claim a realm, to conquer and control land.  Squatting.  Out of context a thing is suddenly a structure, or a sculpture, or a tool.  It’s a form of recycling, the changing of a notion, connotation and destination.  Parallel operating systems proliferate in this abstraction, as if it were a testing ground for alternative futures, as if the means employed to map it generated variable outcomes:  submerged economies, opaque politics, simulations of nonexistent models.  Operating systems translate capabilities into concepts.  Here is the new New Deal:  there’s always a way to move on, find some land and just do it; then, refer back to the system, done.  Clearly, our view of the world and how we deal with it has forever changed.


UNDECIDED
Waiting Land is pervasive and notoriously undecided.  This must be the archeology of the future.  What makes it exciting is its composition of everything there is.  There’s nothing that doesn’t belong here.  And nothing hints at past or future.  That's over.  Now is the transient and seemingly permanent state between the two of them.  Through entropy—that is, disorder—but this time, without the decline from something higher.


CROSSOVER
Waiting Land shows a landscape at the margins, off course from the clearly outlined, indivisible, controlled and productive image.  Its apparent undecidedness and non-functionality questions any raison d’être and seemingly deprives landscape of definition and use.  It is really about de-registration or disappearance from our awareness.  It’s a back and forth between evidence and interpretation, in ongoing rearrangement and re-formation.  It is as much about what we register as about what there is.  And in our updated modes of seeing (or screening) we step into a mediated reality which consists of a composite view (or experience), the result of augmenting or diminishing modifications.  This is the crossover into the stub.  Now it’s about location and condition at the same time: as location Waiting Land occupies a territory deprived of human activity, as condition it renders an environment as the effect of human activity.


























Basic Alchemy—Concrete to Gold, 2004




EXT.*
Southern Italy, Calabria—passing along the Strada Statale 18 Tirrena Inferiore and the Strada Provinciale 43, since 2001 and ongoing. All seasons, different times of day and night.

Waiting Land deliberately omits reference to Calabria so as to draw attention to a more widespread, ubiquitous condition without falling into the trap of sentimentality or critique that accompanies localized perception. Naturally, each take and location suggests another storyline. Calabria has been a land generous with inspirations. Like so much of this globe that appears close but has really remained strange, its challenges wake us up to a present that may be uncomfortable, contradictory, precarious—but that also offer a preview of possibilities and things to come.