Golden Spike | HAJNAL SZOLGA

since 2022 ongoing

According to the latest newsletter of the Anthropocene Working Group (February 2023) the announcement of the GSSP (Global Stratotype Section and Point) site that is to be selected as candidate for submitting at the SQS (Subcomission of Quaternary Startigraphy) will extend into late April, 2023. The working group has difficulty getting 60% or more votes for one of the 12 sites where key anthropogenic signatures has been identified and analysed in the geological record in order to find the „Golden Spike“, a reference point and time of the set-off of the Anthropocene. It is hard not to feel impatient with the scrupulous scientific process trying to establish the Anthropocene as an official geological age, observed from the perspective of humanities, where the term Anthropocene was popularized in the 2010s, has been widely studied, to be consequently critiqued and replaced by new term proposals that hoped to better describe a very complex condition that seems to be determined to end in a climate catastrophy.

Szolga´s Golden Spike installation is rooted in this impatience and anxiety with the belatedness of this search for proof in a temporality when toxic structures, institutions and ways of inhabiting the world persist and the consequences can already long be felt on our very skin and seen with our bare eyes. In what ways could science become again an answer again (and not the problem) and what other sciences that exist and existed might give am answer? Latour’s anthropology of science We have never never modern is a possible first step: mending the modernist separation between nature and culture, thus epistemes, objects and subjects, the scientific method and lab and the social field, by pointing out that this separation never existed. Science does well to reflect its own cosmology as well as its responsibility and complicity.

Interestingly, Szolga employs the photographic medium and satelite perspective as image-making form that have no doubt been complicit with a technocratic vision, a modernist conviction for scientific progress, globalisation and the projection of an outside. Her famous Bauhaus predecessors and compatriots Moholy-Nagy und Kepes have believed in the role of the image in remodelling our thought, feeling, ways of living, in a temporality of modernist enthusiasm. Szolga´s installation comes in another temporality, a century later grows out of a posthuman and decolonial discourse that questions homo economicus’s way of seeing the world. She only mocks the perspective of objective observation (or surveillance), her image is composed of photographs taken from airplanes. Depictions of landscape scars are arranged into a large-scale dystopian, dreamy landscape beyond being a proof of human mingling with earth. It is rather an abstract portrait of the non-human that will persist in a speculative future beyond the anthropocene and humankind.

– written by Virág Major-Kremer, curator and art manager

My work is a large-scale photo collage, which consists of pictures taken from an airplane with a phone during the two last trips to the Experimental Photo Festival in Barcelona. Dozens of aerial photographs – which look like drone footages – create an abstract image that is assembled like a fresco. I compiled the nearly 200 photos in an image editing program. The individual images are maximally »enlarged« photos that depict the landscape’s wounds, defects, and man-made natural damage in an abstract, picturesque way. Spills, decomposition, drilling, excavations and spills together result in a cohesive »technomass«.

– says the artist, Hajnal Szolga