Seu planeta compartilhado

In Seu planeta compartilhado (Your shared planet), a metal frame supports an arrangement of four individually shaped and colored kaleidoscopes with triangular, hexagonal, rhombic, and square apertures. Positioned at eye level, the work invites viewers to move along the openings and gaze through the faceted lenses, colored in yellow, green, turquoise, and blue. The tapered ends of the four optical devices are oriented toward one vanishing point from where the image of a shared planet emerges in the shape of a polyhedral pattern.

The work touches on the recurrent theme in Olafur Eliasson’s art: the interdependence of perception, movement, and space and the many ways they constitute one another. Well-versed in the history of the gaze and its complicity with structures of power, he creates viewing apparatuses that divert, complicate, and externalize the act of seeing, thereby detaching it from its primary role in registering reality.

His instruments and viewing machines aim to recompose perception as the capacity of being-in-the-world with a heightened sense of emotion and embodied cognition, thereby rekindling an expanded sense of presence and attention. By mobilizing viewers and eliciting the experience of seeing differently, Eliasson hopes to reactivate a sense of enchantment with the planet and, with it, a collective political horizon.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "Abundant Futures", C3A, Córdoba, 2022)