Les Charbonnières

The position that Claudio Moser adopts vis-à-vis the reality around him is that of a flâneur, whose experience of the world stems directly from the experience of hiking. When strolling, the artist contemplates reality, and makes a mental map of the territories he crosses. The map is saturated with impressions, emotions, and associations mined from the memory. It is during such hikes of many hours, which are in essence a poetic creative method, that Moser takes his photographs and makes videos. The works from the series of Film Pictures, of which Les Charbonnières is a part, are accompanied by soundtracks composed individually for each of the images.

The supreme determinant of Moser’s works is the place. The artist is particularly fond of landscapes which seem very ordinary, wasteland belonging to nobody, peripheries of cities. When photographing or filming such sites, the artist omits details which would help identify them. He registers views which can be seen anywhere and which usually do not draw anybody’s attention. An example of such images is the video of a forested area split by a path, located in the vicinity of the Swiss town of Les Charbonnières. By reducing the specificity of a given site, the artist is able to reveal its new dimension, the genius loci hidden under the surface.

We see the path leading across the snowy forest from behind two trees. The unusual framing creates an impression of peeping at the landscape, observing it from hiding. The enigmatic and melancholic aura of the place invites one to explore it, to look for hidden senses and stories, to reminisce and fish out connotations rooted in our memory. Moser tries to find the energy of the place. He uncovers its narrative potential and anthropomorphizes it, suggesting that it absorbs impressions, thoughts, and emotions of people, keeping them in its own inaccessible memory. The frequently abused comment that “the work evokes anxiety” is fairly unavoidable in case of Moser’s video. The impact of the piece lies in the fear which appears at the intersection of three domains: sensitivity and the artist’s intimate experience, the memory of the place, and the projection and the mental monologue of the viewer.

Izabela Kopania