Launch event
Friday 5th August
7 – 9pm
Free admission. All welcome
Mars was a place is a new video work by Hondartza Fraga, in collaboration with Markus Lantto. A remote and unidentified landscape slowly sweeps in front of the camera while we hear the word exchange between the two artists. Their conversation reflects on ideas of journey, maps, dislocation and the difficulty in the attempt to carry out a long distance dialogue.
Hondartza Fraga is a visual artist based in Sheffield. During June 2011, she was an artist in residency at Site Gallery (organised by occursus), where she started developing this new work. Her current practice revolves around the notions of distance, journey, loss, displacement and what it might mean to be lost somewhere between home and elsewhere. Deriving from her interest in space exploration, this work is a more personal reflection on the strangeness of the everyday and the familiar in the extraordinary.
“I remember being transfixed by the first lander image to show the horizon of Mars. This was not an alien world, I thought. I knew places like it in Colorado and Arizona and Nevada. There were rocks and sand drifts and a distant eminence, as natural and unselfconscious as any landscape on Earth. Mars was a place.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980