Mountain with No Name (Pandjshêr Valley, Afghanistan), 2003
© Courtesy of the artist
Collection
Lambda print mounted on aluminium
126 x 120.4 cm
133 x 126 x 5 cm (framed)
This series of nine photographs (of which the foundation owns one) is a companion piece to the single-channel film installation Ariana. Mountain with No Name are large-scale portraits of individual mountains surrounding the Pandjshêr Valley in the North East of Afghanistan. These mountains have never been named: they remain blank areas on the map. The local pandjsheris have never needed to label them because they do not form part of their daily activities, they have only named the paths in and out of the valley. Their anonymity runs counter to the Western tradition by which every mountain is named, a practice that coincided with European imperialism and the expansion of the colonies. The mountains surrounding the Pandjshêr Valley exist outside this history.
The mountains appear on maps only as an ensemble, either as Pandjsher Mountains or the Kindu Kush Range. The presence of these mountains both as instigators of the course of history and as witnesses to the successful resistance against the failed political utopias that have elsewhere ruined the country is recalled in these images. If the identification of a place depends on the name, the unnamed mountains maintain themselves, in a sense, as ‘no-place’. The word ‘utopia’ can be derived both from the Greek for ‘no place’ and for ‘good place’: it is both a negation and an affirmation at the same time, therefore neutralizing the logic of opposition. To introduce a ‘no-place’ into the mapped, named and described places of the world- and the ‘exotic’ has served as the provocation for such an imperialist project, a project that from all sides repeatedly stumbled over Afghanistan- is to open a space for utopia, as ‘good place’. Such a space would be of a peculiar kind, since it would have to interrupt the continuity at which the mapping of ‘panoramic’ space aims. It would be a space that interrupts space, and since interruption has a temporal dimension, this would amount an irruption of time into space.
*1969 in Paris, France I Living and working in London, United Kingdom
126 x 120.4 cm
133 x 126 x 5 cm (framed)
This series of nine photographs (of which the foundation owns one) is a companion piece to the single-channel film installation Ariana. Mountain with No Name are large-scale portraits of individual mountains surrounding the Pandjshêr Valley in the North East of Afghanistan. These mountains have never been named: they remain blank areas on the map. The local pandjsheris have never needed to label them because they do not form part of their daily activities, they have only named the paths in and out of the valley. Their anonymity runs counter to the Western tradition by which every mountain is named, a practice that coincided with European imperialism and the expansion of the colonies. The mountains surrounding the Pandjshêr Valley exist outside this history.
The mountains appear on maps only as an ensemble, either as Pandjsher Mountains or the Kindu Kush Range. The presence of these mountains both as instigators of the course of history and as witnesses to the successful resistance against the failed political utopias that have elsewhere ruined the country is recalled in these images. If the identification of a place depends on the name, the unnamed mountains maintain themselves, in a sense, as ‘no-place’. The word ‘utopia’ can be derived both from the Greek for ‘no place’ and for ‘good place’: it is both a negation and an affirmation at the same time, therefore neutralizing the logic of opposition. To introduce a ‘no-place’ into the mapped, named and described places of the world- and the ‘exotic’ has served as the provocation for such an imperialist project, a project that from all sides repeatedly stumbled over Afghanistan- is to open a space for utopia, as ‘good place’. Such a space would be of a peculiar kind, since it would have to interrupt the continuity at which the mapping of ‘panoramic’ space aims. It would be a space that interrupts space, and since interruption has a temporal dimension, this would amount an irruption of time into space.
*1969 in Paris, France I Living and working in London, United Kingdom