SEBASTIAN THEWES

For the project Polarflux Sebastian Thewes was concerned with the topics landscape, wilderness and nature and our relationship to it and the way we are picturing and documenting it.

Sebastian Thewes traveled to the polar region in the northern Scandinavia to collect photographs and audiorecordings from the unique landscape of the region above the polarcircle.

The terms landscape, wilderness and nature have a slightly different meaning in different cultures and for different people in different periods. It depends on cultural, religious and much more dependencies.
For the Sami the ancient people of the European polar region nature is a souled place and every part of it is alive. In classical Roman religion a genius loci names the soul of a place or its spirit. The romantic sees nature as a counter pole to the society. It uses nature and landscape as a symbol. In our modern western culture the perception of nature is shifting between many different conceptions. On the one hand we are destroying nature with our industrial progress but on the other hand we are seeing nature as a spot for the enjoyment of our individuality by doing sports or traveling. The project Polarflux is shifting between different ideas of landscapes. The viewer is flying through 9 Scenes which represent 9 fictive places inhabited by different sprits. It is rying to work out our somehow disharmonious or maybe even dishonest relation to nature in an slightly ironic way. The used nature photos are photographed in the polar region and mixed up with found footage and algorithmically generated patterns. The audiorecordings consist out of field recordings from the region combined with soundrecordings from the NASA and synthetically created material.