Transition

open series of photographs depicting human creativeness in improvisation due to architectural and environmental transitory circumstances, since 1999, exhibition at Galería Esther Montoriol, Barcelona, 2008

>transition<, a different kind of beauty

Modern societies have created a world in which mankind vanishes and becomes untraceable. It seems that man is erasing himself just because he is being made replaceable. Everything looks the same, everything we consume, everything that is given to us. Like an archaelogist of the future I have been searching for those last silent human tracks and traces in deserted places, in industrial landscapes or seemingly abandoned houses. In my photographs  I somehow try to fight against the disappearance, discovering traces of human actions and creation, manipulations and improvisations of functional and innocent, almost playful and childlike creativity. Suddenly I find real beauty in the functional side of something. And I find a function in beauty! It's the unintentional and non-designed design, the things we never take notice of. We complement our surroundings with our own design, this is how we extend our limits - even the imaginative. For that man needs to set his own creation against his environment. And he sometimes does it unconsciously - simply because he does it.

I believe that the things we make are extensions of ourselves. This is how we create a space for what is not fitting inside us anymore. The things are being made for their own purpose, thus they communicate in a universal language. To me these unseen things are a manifesto of creation and life and of course of purest beauty: they are a tribute to the power of imagination and remind me of what I am.

Hartmut Landauer

Las sociedades modernas crean un mundo donde el ser humano desaparece y es imposible de hallar. Al hacerse sustituible, se autoelimina”. En la serie de fotografia digital "transition", Hartmut Landauer evoca, en imágenes desérticas tomadas en varios países del mundo, la presencia espiritual del hombre. En un vano intento de combatir la desaparición, muestra la huella de la presencia y acción humana en lugares aparentemente desolados. Se trata de mostrar lo que pasa inadvertido, lo que no se ve. De repente se despliega una anárquica poesía. Los espacios, antes deshabitados, se llenan del genio de sus invisibles habitantes. ¿Hay belleza en la función, en la improvisación funcional? y ¿qué función tiene la belleza?

Se trata de buscar rastros, manifestaciones de la creación, de la vida. Estas fotografías son un homenaje a la imaginación del individuo. El hombre contrapone siempre algo a su mundo; acondiciona y complementa su entorno ampliando, de esta manera, sus límites; incluso los imaginados.

Ileana Viteri