LOCAL #1 (Pyrenees)

In October 2014 and April 2016 I had the chance to work in residency at the Centre d'Art i Natura in Farrera, a tiny village in the Catalonian Pyrenees close to the border of Andorra.
I set out to capture visual and auditory sensations engendered by natural phenomena such as the movements of the winds, the colours of the rocks and vegetation or the flow of watercourses.

The project features a series of works that embody and unfurl essential characteristics of the local topography and the environment I became part of. I let the turbulent mountain winds carry my DIY kite equipped with a video camera; painted and catalogued colour perceptions in an archive of water colours and photographs; extracted minerals from the rocks and used them as paint and followed the meandering creeks on their way from the high sources of melting snow through the meadows into the deep river valley. Walking, climbing and flying over the mountains turned my body to an instrument of observation as well: I felt the terrain under my feet, breathed in the air and absorbed the scenery through my eyes.

My outrageous endeavour is foolishly ambitious: with these little exercises in environmental geography I attempted to mediate sensibilities and sensations that are supposed to reveal no less than the soul of the landscape itself - or if you will - the (in)famous genius loci.