Yet to be Titled

The first gaze towards the Earth from the point of view of another planet belonged to the first men landing on the Moon in 1969 - the Apollo 11 Astronauts. The pictures of the earth they produced however were not the first images of the Earth seen from a distance. A year earlier Stanley Kubrick already did that as part of his film " 2001: A Space Odyssey" with such visionary precision that the actual documentary footage that came year later looked like a déjà-vu.

This was just the beginning of a long series of iconic pictures of the Earth that shapes our idea of how the planet looks like from the point of view of an approaching extraterrestrial. In this journey of image-making Kubrick's imaginationandthefirsthandexperienceofthe documentary shots by the Apollo astronauts were replaced by the composite collages of data sets covering the globe, created by carefully sifting through satellite-captured sequences taken over time in the series entitled "Blue Marble" taken in 1972, 2003, 2012 with ever greater resolution and detail.

"Yet to be Titled" (2018) is experiment in perspective. The element added to the "Blue Marble" is the silhouette of a Palm tree in the foreground. If the shot was taken from a position somewhere below the tree, it raises automatically the question: "what exactly is the place where this scene could be seen from?". Yet, despite the enigmatic strangeness of the vantage point the scene looks somewhat familiar. Countless wallpapers, screen-savers, billboard backgrounds and other vernacular imagery feature a similar iconic setup - exotic palm trees set against the background of a Sunset, or Sunrise or full Moon (may be the other two most emotionally loaded planets next to the Earth).

"Yet to be Titled" combines these two iconic images to produce an explosive contradiction in perspectives, equally applying the distance of eternal extra-orbital calm with the intimate fantasies longing for pristine tropical landscapes, and instantaneously triggers models of association. The concrete figuration and direction of associations is left to the beholder. The ecological catastrophe that currently threatens with accelerating speed to extinct the human species from the face of the planet comes naturally in mind, but is not the only possible reading of the image. In the face of current rise of narrow minded nationalisms I find such a view from a distance might prove to be productive.