Christiana Galanopoulou, Nadia Kalara: Lost

We are lost between the abyss within us and the boundless horizons outside us

R. Smithson, "A cinematic Atopia", 1971

The journey: a transition from the homely to the uncanny. This is the story behind the Lost installation. Landscapes, textures, sounds: travelling turns everything into the object of observation and of a new interpretation.

The road, this earth-road crossing the water never arriving anywhere, is an ideogram of travelling. A nod to the memory of a film journey all of us have shared, the installation video is a minimalist road movie deprived of any action. A sense of escapism and freedom. The spectator’s gaze identifies to the camera, recording the landscape without any emotional investment, weightlessly.

In the serene states of Nadia Kalara, in her reconstructed digital images based on material from fishing huts in Hastings, a city in southern England, the mysterious charm of the uncanny and eerie world of De Chirico prevails. The northern light ―almost guessed at since the sky is not visible― the loneliness, the sense of a concealed life, which may come across, meet the virtual nature of cities. These states, landscapes which might correspond to some of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, become immediately upon being looked at, destination and arrival at the same time. They seem both real and virtual, both from the past and from the future.

Architecture, space, the representation of space are recurrent themes in Nadia Kalara’s paintings. Yet, her main interest in this work is not recording and reconstructing the urban landscape. In Kalara’s work, the city is a landscape, a maze, or the map of a land still virtual, as we do not comprehend it in its true dimensions, reconstructed by the very act of being toured, by the experience of loss of orientation.

There is a tension here: The quiet, cubist and at the same time minimalist feeling conveyed by the huts photographs contrasts with the busy image of the urban landscape in the selected area of Athens. The actual city operates as one of the factors determining the work and at the same time it represents the experienced space, a landscape of memory. The serenity of the huts landscapes conflicts with the noise of the city and the landscapes of memory. This conflict may inspire nostalgia to the viewer: a feeling involving the memory of a specific space; a feeling which presupposes loss.

The accumulation of different landscapes and the description of others is a game of disorientating the spectator, a disorientation already reflected in the title. Visual artist Robert Smithson’s text, which is heard – an extract of his article “A tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (published in Artforum, December 1967) – aims to undermine the sense of space and time. This is typical of Smithson’s texts, which undermine language, codes, concepts (such as the concept of monument) and spaces.

Robert Smithson, a seminal artist of the ’60’s and ’70’s American avant-garde, posed through his work and theoretical texts questions which are still pivotal points of our problematic as to what we generally call “post-modern art,” as Gary Shapiro remarks in his book Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997). Art's place in time and history; the possibilities and the limits of the process of decentering the structure, site and context of the work; the question of the medium (his use of earth, for example), its resistance to form and art's ability (or inability) to let matter challenge our conceptions and presuppositions; the role of language and textuality (is everything a text?); and the place of the artist after and despite the collapse of modern conceptions of creativity, genius and autonomy, are some of these questions. The fact that Robert Smithson’s work engages seriously with all of these, helps us to realise why it has been an unavoidable point of reference in the contemporary art world and why, several years after his death, his writings remain crucial for theorists like Owens and Rosalind Krauss.

In this respect, Smithson’s writings become a point of reference for Lost – a surprisingly vital one in a period of redefinition for the main concepts in art, a discussion in which the artist is clearly involved in her academic capacity. At the same time, Smithson reconceptualises space and memory, concepts which are also consistent in her own work.

In Nadia Kalara’s work, the concepts of space, place and landscape are all related to those of memory and time. The landscape becomes a monument of space, a stimulus for the memory to return to a lived experience.

Aware of his or her present and of the actual place where he or she is, surrounded by fictional landscapes, watching a realistic film about a landscape and connecting to the past through the texts, the visitor loses sense of time and place and is being led to a no man’s land, to a land where time does not exist.

In her book Passages in Modern Sculpture (Thames and Hudson, London, 1977), Rosalind Krauss reads anew the History of Sculpture from Rodin to Smithson pointing out the way in which sculptors invite viewers to an experience aiming to connect them to an archetypal one. These works are according to Krauss an equivalent of the madeleine for the narrator in Proust's In search of time lost: objects which impose memory and through our senses let us comprehend present experiences linked to the archetypal experience.

The passage: a ritual between memory and the present, a site where any action bears an enigmatic meaning of mystical initiation, a landscape by the transitional river of Acheron, a place like the Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a weird meeting point in a Lynch film, a non-location in The stopping mind or The crossing installations by Bill Viola. Lost is a similar invitation to a mystic journey.

Lost—an ambiguous title: It refers to the feeling of loss, to the resurfacing of lost things through our memory due to a stimulus, a text or an image, as well as to the loss of the sense of space and time. Or to our eventual desire to get lost inside a point of passage, a point like this work, beyond place and time, from where we would be able to look at “back when,” “later,” “always.” We might even be able to recognise ourselves in there.