Jonas Maria Ried
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THE STAGE OF NATURE (extracts)
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Text: Moritz Stangl
On the occasion of the exhibition ‘WE GREW SOME EYES’ at Villa Merkel
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At the time that I was getting to know Jonas Maria Ried better, we were riding down a mountain pass in the Alps - by bicycle. Jonas slept in a one-man tent at night, which was so poor at keeping out the rain that puddles soon formed inside. The next morning, he explained to me that he did push-ups until his body heat had warmed the air in the tent. Then the moisture in the puddles evaporates by itself, so that it is quite dry inside until the condensation starts to drip from the tent ceiling again in the morning. I believe that this anecdote also tells us something about Jonas Maria Ried's work. His artistic approach can perhaps be understood as a humorous and desperate attempt to re-stage nature in an experimental way.
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The crude idea of creating a mini-ecosystem from rain and evaporation in his sleeping tent is nothing other than the everyday facet of an equally experimental and theatrical relationship to ecology.
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[...]In his works, Jonas Maria Ried repeatedly alienates the dominant images of nature of the 19th century, not only to question them ironically, but rather to translate something of them into a contemporary way of thinking, which conceptualises the relationship between man and nature in completely different terms of networking, systems, interaction and communication.
[...]And in the anecdote about the damp tent, it is not difficult to recognise the figure of the hiker who seeks contact with raw nature. In the video work ‘Wassersturz’, Jonas Maria Ried appears as a romantic figure on his back, looking at a mighty cliff in the background. The surroundings of mossy, washed-out rocks, fallen trees and remnants of ice and snow give the impression of rough, wild nature.
The only disturbing element is a thin white line in the centre of the picture, which turns out to be a rope that Ried pulls to trigger a waterfall on the cliff via an invisible mechanism - the sublime effect of nature turns out to be a direct influence of the subject.
Through the act with which the figure from behind acts directly into the natural scenery, nature falls out of the picture, so to speak - it becomes a theatre backdrop or model landscape.
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In Jonas Maria Ried's work, nature is obviously not something that can be viewed from a window, but requires active staging.
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[...] His engagement with nature is a work with living matter, but as such also a work on the symbols, images and metaphors that materially shape this nature. The process of ‘re-staging’ in Jonas Maria Ried's works consists of the permanent reshaping of the symbolic and material forms of nature, that ‘constant exchange of forms’ in which Bruno Latour sees the task of man in the symbolic-ecological system of a globalised nature.
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