Alexandre Melay
“Globalisation starts as a geometrisation of that what cannot be measured.” (Sloterdijk, 2010, p. 41)
The photographs of the [TIMESCAPES] series offer an engaging perspective on human’s thirst for their environment, a thirst that defines the early 21st century. These questions are typical of the contemporary extreme, and include the impossibility of landscape and the crisis of urbanity, the emergence of non-places and the attempt to invent spaces to live in the face of a relentless structuralist deconstruction of the subject. Capitalism, born of the age of the Anthropocene – or “the Century of Men”, which was ushered by the Industrial Revolution – has taken over our visual language, in which an entire urban imaginary has been structured, constructed and designed. Moreover, it has established a system that draws on both reality and fiction, between social reality and poetic imagination, between documentary and fiction. A system whose spaces-worlds create unique ways and aesthetic shapes that become privileged scenarios of representative fictions of the contemporary space. In other words, this urban contemporary extreme, born from the Capitalocene, is translated into an unbridled urbanisation of the planet, where the cities-worlds define new was of the urban. All of these photographic non-spaces designate spaces-worlds, this is, they are images of territories described as intermediary. While the urban environment is constructed and deconstructed in multiple occasions, these images reveal a particular system: that of a flow collection and distribution apparatus. It is an illustration of the technosphere, the physical part of the environment affected by man-induced changes. Said in other words, the technosphere includes the totality of human constructions, from the very first tools to the latest technological advances, including the infrastructures, the industry markets, the different means of transport and all of the transformed products. This way, the changes of the planet become a reflection of the changes within our human societies.
This spaces in perpetual movement also illustrate the phenomenon of the acceleration of time and its deviations in territories in constant transformation, where eternity only manifests itself through change (since, without movement, there seems not to be a becoming in the era of the Capitalocene). The extreme effects of globalisation are now reshaping hundreds of cities, turning them into a showcase of wild capitalism. Indeed, the constant chaos of these cities is striking; an urban revolution consisting of buildings that impose a socio-spatial segregation between the density and vertical urbanism. Moreover, it implies a vision of abstract and uncontrolled urban growth, where every city becomes global, moving and in constant change, trapped in the unbridled and uncontrollable pace of urbanisation imposed by the globalisation of capitalism. The photographs feature geometrically dominated compositions that tends towards abstraction, and the conditions for defining the abstract are the very characteristic of the acceleration of the world. Thus, the abstraction of globalisation and the rationality of capitalism represent the abstraction of the material reality associated with a global trade in which capital has achieved ultimate dematerialisation. Such abstraction and geometrisation of space reveal the predominance of a rationalised thought in which the grid serves as a point of support for an economy based on optimised standard procedures. Naturally, this formal apparatus becomes a symbol of the principles of instrumental reason and economic efficiency. In fact, this grid simultaneously structures and (re)updates the relations with the environment and the world. By creating a flat and infinite space, at a time where human beings seem not yet to bother about the catastrophic fate they are creating, distances disappear, each position equals to another, cultural differences vanish and the individual ends up alienated, and their sociability, impoverished. Faced with this situation, it is urgent to put an end to the logic of destruction that reigns on the planet in order to reinvent the cohabitation of living beings through multiple intertwined worlds. Only this way it is possible to overcome the tension between the human being an the environment.
Alexandre Melay
Doctor in Arts, Aesthetics and Theory of Contemporary Arts by the University of Lyon. Artist and researcher by the National School of Fine Arts of Lyon. Professor and researcher at the Aix-Marseille University, where he dedicates his work to aesthetics, imaginary and the experience of the Anthropocene. His photographic work examines the human space-time, the ways of modernity and the mutation phenomena of the era of globalisation. He also approaches symptomatic topics and questions of the contemporary era, where fiction and reality mix.
Go to his webpage: alexandremelay.com
