Remember This Land
Stefan Raubenheimer
Mezzanine Gallery: 07.08.25 - 25.09.25
These drawings are a meditation on the failure of humanity to look after its home. My work is a constant reminder of how we have violated our land, rivers, oceans and atmosphere. We seem to be retreating from all memory of our indelible link to nature. This retreat will, I am certain, have existential consequences.
We all seem to “feel” this forgetting in some way. For the first time, I now sense among people a sadness, a fear, and a feeling of foreboding about our future. It is not something anyone talks about much, but I sense it now inhabits our collective consciousness. Only a faint part of our memory is of that time when we truly lived in and with nature.
I hope these drawings speak to this forgetting and fear of an uncertain future, but also to our yearning for landscape.
This is not a nostalgic meditation, but rather one about how we are changing. I saw the first film of the Koyaanisqatsi film trilogy in Amsterdam in 1985. Godfrey Reggio, who made the films, is a fascinating commentator about place, memory, and technology. His view of our “life out of balance” was prescient even then. Reggio says: “It’s not that we use technology, it is that we live technology”. The three Reggio films have a psychedelic feeling; they are trippy and synesthetic and speak to our non-conscious selves. On the issue of landscape, he says:
“The hero of the film is who I call the genius loci. Every location has a genius loci. It has a memory. It has a presence. It’s filmable. You can light it by the sun. It’s visible to the whole world, and because it’s so familiar, nobody sees it.”
Each of my drawings tries to find this “genius loci” of a particular place in my memory and imagination, lit by the sun, clouds, or the constellation of Orion in the night sky. Sometimes I add the evidence of human calibration to the drawings: our marks on nature, measuring and assessing, but they are just that: minor marks, inconsequential, transient, and illogical. For me, the tree is emblematic in this exhibition – it is a metaphor for so much I am trying to convey.