Notes


¹ Winner of the Edinburgh College of Art’s Critical Writing Prize as part of their coverage of the Class of 2020’s graduate degree show. 

² For more images and information on the artist and artworks featured in this piece go to:

https://www.degreeshow.eca.ed.ac.uk/2020/news-features/material-stories-inverting-anthropocentric-gaze

https://www.degreeshow.eca.ed.ac.uk/2020/lorenzo-rangoni-robertson

https://vimeo.com/rangonil
 

Article: Material Stories

 
Material Stories: Inverting the Anthropocentric Gaze. Words by Tabitha Carless-Frost. Artwork of Lorenzo Rangoni Robertson, 2020 ECA Degree Show.

            Eerie and beautiful, Lorenzo Rangoni Robertson’s Material Stories displaces the human through subtle perspectival shifts and explores our urgent need for environmental preservation via the age-old act of gathering. Natural materials and stories are collected alike, taken apart, reassembled and reinvented.

Material Stories unearths the latent symmetry between language and trees: the concealed root systems of etymological usage entangling each word with its semantic neighbour in just the same way that trees are all interconnected by the Wood Wide Web of roots. Like the rhizomatic structure of trees, language’s collaboration of meaning is always able to change and grow in different directions without ever totally losing connection to its origin. Similarly, the cultural stories we tell about our planet are organic and far from absolute, the separationist rhetoric of ‘man versus nature’ being the most prominent. Rangoni Robertson engages with the elemental strands of such narratives, draws them apart and flips them. In opening out the root system and revealing its understor(e)y, Stories prompts a reconsideration of the ecological and ontological narratives which have shaped our understanding of the world.

Captured on grainy film, the witchily beautiful stills from Rangoni Robertson’s Creature of the Forest plays upon the idea of discovery, but intriguingly by evoking its opposite. A phantom limb protrudes uncannily from a pile of moss, willow, twigs and leaves. The faceless form evokes an aesthetic atmosphere of eco-horror - its ‘Day of the Triffids’ meets Tacita Dean. By choosing to cover his human subject in this way, Rangoni Robertson becomes able to dis-cover, to reveal the blurred and indistinct line which divides the traditional man-nature binary. This erasure of definite divisions evokes the liminal elements of the work such as the frequent mirroring, inversions, and portals. Each subject in Creature is thus concealed in order to be revealed in their rawest form: matter. By opening up what Albert Camus described as ‘a region where matter drives language aside’ - a ‘weird realm’ where matter refuses to ‘mean’ - Rangoni Robertson effectively levels man and nature, unifying them through their shared materiality. In this light, the anthropocentric narrative of humanity’s special separateness is rendered unconvincing.



Points of Contact, a film of spontaneous performances in crafted sets, explores the boundaries, or lack of, between artist and nature, establishing a non-hierarchical equilibrium in the process. In one still, the artist’s body folds round a trunk of wood, hands and feet precariously balanced, yet deeply rooted to the surface by grooved hand-holds. The body is contorted, perched like some arboreal creature, human face hidden, with only a tangle of wood and limbs visible. The mediums of human body and wood draw attention to the symmetry and synergy between the two: wood contorts body as much as body carves wood, thus creating a fluid interchange of co-causation, whilst also diminishing the metaphysical distinction between them. Philosopher Emanuele Coccia has explored how plants, as neither physically nor metaphysically separable from the world which accommodates them, have ‘modified the metaphysical structure of our world’. For Coccia, it is only the fanatical tenacity with which humanity tries to make itself distinct from the rest of nature that separates us, rather than anything ontological. Human beings’ very existence defies the separatist rules of ‘man and nature’ and Lorenzo knows it. We have never been singular entities, but rather exist as holobionts: collaborative compound organisms of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and tissue. The work therefore forces us to rethink our own ontology within the context of a new biocentric, rather than anthropocentric, view. Pointedly, many of Points’ stills are photoshopped so that their images are flipped beneath them, mirrored as if by a pool of water. In doing so, a portal is opened into an estranged inversion of our own world, creating a borderless entrance which beckons us towards the conceptual flipping that his work invites.

Lastly, Lorenzo’s film A Curious Woodland Creature might then be seen as an exercise in sight: seeing from the other side of the portal and reflecting back onto our own world through the eyes of the biocentric Other. The film follows a lone figure, a strange wood nymph masked in twigs and woodland debris, as they stravaig around Edinburgh. This apparition from the natural world, displaced within the tower blocks and fluorescent lights of the urban centre, evokes an acute feeling of solastalgia: the feeling of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change, the pain of coming home to find that home is no longer there. Woodland Creature also has something Folk Horror-esque in its shaky handheld camera work and accompanying seventies folk music, yet Lorenzo seems to shift the source of the unease from the natural sublime to the urban wyrd. Where traditionally the sublime is associated with natural landscapes, here Lorenzo reframes its coexisting awe and fear within an urban setting. As the unsettling and unsettled creature wanders the streets a strange empathy arises and we are reminded that for the natural world, along with the plants and animals that inhabit it, we are their unknowable Other too.

As in many Folk Horror films, Lorenzo’s work connects layers of history, ecology, and cultural memory to reveal that, along with the rural, the urban is also home to ghosts and rituals. However, where cosmic horror is evoked by the natural matter of folk horror, Lorenzo’s urban ghosts seem to represent the repressed memory of the many disturbing practices associated with the ritual of global capitalism. Interestingly, in Folk Horror, individuals are often depicted as either entirely powerless in the face of bigger forces - political, religious, or supernatural - or else they are subsumed by and become the force. We are again made to think of what it means to exist in the age of the Anthropocene as we, being ourselves the force, are also thus consumed by it.

In the context of an age where political indifference is cultivated and the natural world is primarily been seen as a resource for human beings, Lorenzo’s work lends an acute urgency to the ecological mission against the climate crisis. Above all else it reminds us that the thing we are destroying - the earth - is not separate from us, nor distinct from our homes or our loved ones; it is us. 

︎ An original article by Tabitha Carless-Frost, 2020.