Thomas Zika
*1963 Haan - D

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Hierogamos

On April 26th in the  year 1335, Italian poet and so called father of humanism Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) set out to climb up Mont Ventoux (a 1912 m high mountain-ridge in the alps in the South of France); with the aim to enjoy the view of the broadening landscape –„only driven by the desire to get known the unusual height of a place by immediate point of view“.

Having reached the peak, he was literally stupefied by the unusual breath of air and the free panorama. He has been a very spiritual man, and he immediately connected his unknown perception of nature with his deep spiritual belief in God.

Petrarca tried to interpret the occurrence within the background of the philosophical theory of the cosmos. For middle European intellectual history Petrarca’s literal descriptions in an enduring manner witnessed an experience, in which nature as totality was experienced by the surrounding landscape.
Within the philosophical tradition of the cosmic theory the whole as totality is reserved only to spiritual insight. But with the view of whole nature as landscape there is reached a new form of cosmic theory: landscape is nature, which gets aesthetically present when viewed by a sensitive observer.

Landscape doesn’t come into existence, until man turns towards nature without a practical purpose, only by free floating enjoying view. That means landscape could only originate, as modern man succeeded in emancipating from nature by perceiving it consciously as an opposite one. Thus having gained new freedom it became possible to make a new turn towards nature by creating a consciously controlled coherence between man and nature. Landscape always was the product of a cultural process.

'Hierogamos', 2004-2005
Edition of 5, lambda-print, 120x120 cm / 47.3"x47.3"
Edition of 6, lambda-print, 50 x 50 cm / 19.7" x 19.7"

Within my photographic project entitled „hierogamos“ [hierogamos: Greek: the sacred marriage of heaven and earth, of God with his creation) firstly I want to make a homage to Petrarca’s delivered description of nature. Ecstatic enthusiasm inaugurated by immediate sensual perception of landscape is flanked by the threatened feeling from an alienated view of an unideal landscape. My photography wants to oscillate two states of perception: landscape as man’s possible possession – and landscape as the thing never to possess.
Within my work I want to create an atmosphere that is partially resembling Chris Marker’s film „La Jetée“. I try to develop this atmosphere by creating an utopic grace inhabiting self- and media reflexivity.
I short-circuit between the mediation and the appropriation of natural and cultural environments by individual observers – seeing and taking photographs become an identical procedure. That means that the persons of my motives let become aware, that there is no such thing as landscape itself, which has „always been there“, but is constituted by human thinking and feeling.
 
In my photographic series I am returning to the roots of landscape perception but also its cultivation. Technical artifacts characterize nature’s appropriation by the tourism industry, first of all these traces of civilization create a viewpoint where nature evolves to the perception unit landscape. My pictorial rhetoric aims to actualize historical categories as the beautiful and the sublime by using a contemporary perspective. The distanced view and the view creating distance are assumptions for reflexion and knowledge. For me this is one of the strongest tasks and possibilities of photography as art.

Thomas Zika

hierogamos 001

hierogamos 003

hierogamos 004

hierogamos 031

hierogamos 036

hierogamos 079

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