2007·2008 - nairs.ch

ROSANNA TRAINA | LONDONFar left: For Mother (2008), black spraypaint,dimensions variableLeft: Autofocus (2008), video, 7’ 22”This summer was one of the most extraordinary of summers I’ve experienced.Having secured a placein a building I knew nothing about, in a country I was hardly familiar with, I prepared potential projects forweeks on end prior to this residency only to throw them out of my studio window within a few days of arriving there. The conceptsgenerated in London were unworkable in a space like this. One’sunderstanding of the reaches of ‘beauty’ becomes dim in the city.The morning lightacross the Thames bridges with it’s hazy mass-expanse of space, which I thought astounding, couldn’t haveprepared me for the light and sound and natural beauty flooding in through that window each day at shockingly early hours.The obtuse angle of the morning sun dousing the deep green pine trees in an orange flame as if it were autumn. Sleep an hourmore, and wake again to see the trees retaining their dense colour against a perfectly bright cloudless sky, Pantone colour:Engiadina Blue. Walks were intoxicating - surely this idyll was a photoshop composite, it can’t be real. Making work immediatelybecame problematic. How can one negotiate any dialogue with the mountain? And how can one make anything of any interest,let alone worth, in this context - the competition with the mountain not even worth attempting.Funny -how things go in circles - for despite my fevered planning, I had thought much about the absurdity of humancreation - artistic in particular - amongst nature, and there I was, right in that situation.Paradoxically, this brick wall became my door with a simple switch to working with text, not visuals (primarily). Text, Language- one of the purest, most abstract, hypothetical, imaginary of constructions we, as humans, are responsible for, but, probablythe single most moving captivating and all-consuming construction that can even start to possibly match the powerful impactof nature.With this process in place,and thinking about the persistency of text/language to pin meaning down,rationalising it, I embarked on a parallel exploration that looked at acts which comment on our rationalising of nature. Theprimary work emerging from this thread of thought - autofocus - doesn’t attempt to restore our lost reciprocal harmony withnature, just to comment upon it.89