Urban Landscape - Understanding Nature; the 10th International Art Festival Kranj

This year's jubilee, 10th International Art Festival Kranj gives meaning to the theme Urban Landscape - Understanding Nature, which touches on the understanding of nature and space through the development of fine arts from the very beginning of perception of life and how we perceive it, shared the festival's artistic director, mag. Klavdij Tutta. Various aspects of this theme are presented by works of one hundred authors from 26 countries at various festival venues throughout the old town of Kranj - till November 2.

Landscape@Souvenir, I Remember the Landscapes..., consists of video projection Kepler 542b (with music by Hayato Nakao) and Caryatids of Empathy and Trust, an assemblage of glass hand-engraved objects and collages of recycled lace.

When we look to the future and look to the present, and even as we examine the past, it no longer seems relevant to think about what a landscape is and what a degraded landscape is, but sadly more about what kind of memory we want to cultivate and share, if at all, on the notion of landscape; - a concept tied to our home, our Earth, our life.

Just before his death, British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, interpreter of the universe and our existence, and a visionary of the future of the world, the universe and ourselves, warned that humanity must find a new home in space, a new landscape, preferably one that would be as similar as possible to ours here on Earth, at home, because we know that it is loyal to us and that it will degrade under us - not we under it… which unfortunately is happening here and now before our eyes, under our feet.

If we rely on now available scientific research, we may be promised a potentially similar landscape on one of the many theoretically found Kepler worlds. In order to be able to find a new world, a new landscape, similar to ours here and now, it is therefore crucial to preserve the memory of this landscape here and now before it is completely degraded, reminds our video Kepler 542b.

What is and what will be the memory of the landscape of our Earth, our home, when our landscape is no more? Will we have movies that revolve and show footage from our once-existing Earth, or will we have songs that we learn and sing as sacred prayers, dream etudes to conjure back our landscapes, sung and described in ancient times?

Will we have pills that will trigger hallucinations of former landscapes or a sacredly stored human memory of landscapes in the form of works of art - photographs, drawings and paintings from our ancient world of Earth, that will trigger feelings to understand the concept of landscape, the concept of Earth, the notion of our home once somewhere far back in antiquity?

The installation Caryatids of Empathy and Trust highlights empathy and trust as the main components of the human emotional landscape, in the form of two caryatids - pillars that act as the vertebrae of the spine of our post-crown time. With their transparency and fragility, they point out that we must nurture and maintain the capacity for empathy and trust as features of the human emotional landscape. At the same time, they point to the collective fragility of the human race, for which eternal existence is not self-evident.