Review of «2062» in Seoul

Baek Gi-Yeong, Head of Curators at the Seoul Museum of Art, wrote about the work of Karla Kracht and Andrés Beladiez under the title «Apocalypse, a Theater of Serial Disasters». It was published in Seoul, in Korean, in 2017. The text begins with the device —the camera that lies in wait for the spectator— and ends in 2062.

Vilem Flusser, a media philosopher in Germany, defines his camera as an “apparat” in his book on photography and notes that the Latin word of apparatus, the origin word of “apparat”, came from the verb apparare (prepare). He explains that the “apparat” is described as “a state of waiting for something in expectation” in the sense that a camera has the nature of a beast that bares its teeth and awaits its prey. The installation work of Karla and Andres is conceived as an apparat awaiting the movement of viewers. The apparat comes alive and moves like a scene of a fairy tale where a spell is broken and everything is awakened once a viewer appears.

In Karla and Andres’ work, 2062, a huge city made of paper appears on the front of an image projection. Behind a forest of buildings in the giant city, a long-beaked bird drawn by Karla slips through somewhere either the sky or the background of buildings. Ceramic characters that look like small dolls face various situations in the dark and gloomy maze-like city. Following the movement of sensors synchronized with the movement of viewers, the camera projects images of specific situations and people in close-up on the stage: the World Trade Center reminiscent of the 9/11 terrorist attack, a young man in front of a tank at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and people facing the disaster of Fukushima nuclear power plant. The big-headed, alien-looking characters gaze with big and horrified eyes at the spectators who seem to be under the illusion that they are in the Kingdom of the Little People.

The city full of buildings on the stage represents not just a specific city but all cities on the planet. Today, the world is rapidly urbanizing, and big and small events are happening every day in cities connected to the Internet. For Karla and Andres, a “city” is a “theater of disasters” that is confronted by a series of disasters.

— Baek Gi-Yeong, Apocalypse, a Theater of Serial Disasters