gabriel orłowski

The land cracks under the weight; sweaty, salty, granular and finely cured. Terrain dynamics are subtle and, with each click, subtler still. More quicksand than marshland. Wellsprings are scarce and the vessel is near empty, dehydrated. The produce has been miscalculated and mismanaged, drained of all the substance. A transformation corrupted, a process in negative. Ambience reiterates into an inhospitable and unsustainable surface. It is barely recognizable what came before. Every environment, left unattended, eventually smoothes itself out, with no forces, no carvings, cravings or movement. The biome relapses into a copybook – a pliant plateau, terraformed and barren. The realm of sub-nature, that ain’t a country for people no more.

In a capitalized realm, water is among the primary industrialized goods, requiring constant yield and supply. Floodland documents the efforts of harnessing and taming the natural flow of water and the physical space it inhabits. It pictures – subjectively – the fluvial phenomenology, its’ infrastructure, storage, as well as the occurrences and fallout of the commodification of water and the resulting changes in the biological balance.