TERRA DIASPORA - AKTIVES TERRAIN N°3

In summer 2025, artist Mélodie Mousset and the art duo Virginie Ittah and Kai Yoda will present a multimedia terrain on the first floor of the Künstlerhaus Göttingen that surrounds visitors and appeals to many senses, including the sense of touch and smell. The intertwining installations range from the origins of cave painting, through ongoing traditional lines in sculpture and contemporary expressionism, to virtually generated landscapes, played via VR glasses. One of the core works from the latter area is the installation HanaHana by Swiss French artist Mélodie Mousset. This interactive virtual reality experience, which has been growing for years, offers guests the opportunity to walk through a virtual landscape with the help of controllers, while actively exploring and shaping it and constantly changing or regenerating the landscape in the process. The freedom, beauty and safety in HanaHana feels remarkable, and opens up a completely digitally generated alternative world, a material-free ‘safe space’ of a special kind.
The simulation space of Hana Hana will be embedded in a far-reaching exhibition design by the French-Japanese art duo Ittah Yoda. The two work together on linking sculpture, painting and installation with technically advanced media such as digitally generated sculptures and images and virtual reality. The two have coined the term ‘Symbiocene’ for these intertwined spaces between tangible materiality and digital vision, and they see their projects as utopian designs for a sustainable symbiosis of ecological cycles and technology. Thematically, the exhibition offers an innovative examination of the visual culture of humans in Europe in their interaction with the surrounding landscape. As a source of inspiration, both positions share a fascination for the cave paintings of Lascoux and Chauvet and others, i.e. the first permanent images of the inhabitants of a region. These early testimonies can be understood as an act of self-assurance, as a permanent testimony to one's own existence, as a visual archiving of fellow creatures or as cultic communication with the environment. These are all impulses that have always driven the creation of art. Inspired by these archaic testimonies of cultural self-empowerment, both Ittah Yoda and Mélodie Mousset explore in their works, among other things, the question: "How can the specificity of a territory be embodied today?" - "Or how can completely new imaginary terrains be created on the basis of our cultural history?" In their free, rather associative research, they largely detach themselves from real geographical conditions in comparison to other more conceptual positions in the annual programme TERRA DIASPORA - ACTIVE TERRAINS. They negotiate concepts such as "landscape", "place" and "production" more in dialogue with the anthropological and cultural appropriation of this theme by people in the course of cultural history. It is therefore more about the ideas of landscape than about current, actual geographical upheavals in the culmination of the Anthropocene. This exhibition thus not only adds important aspects to the annual programme, but also builds a bridge to the fantastic and surrealist tendencies of the 2024 TERRA DIASPORRA - WELTEN WANDELN annual programme. In addition to our reliable supporting institutions, this time the additional support from the Lower Saxony Foundation and the Institut Français in particular enables the Kunstverein team to tackle and realise this exhibition concept at the cutting edge of technology and art in Göttingen.