About the Work
An exploding landscape. The most famous blast in film history is the finale of Michelangelo Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point" (1970). In the eroded rock of Death Valley, where at the beginning of the 20th century the Pacific Coast Borax Company led by Christian Brevoort Zabriskie uncovered the crystalline mineral with their explosions, a mountain explodes silently to the sounds of Pink Floyd and mixes with the ruins of the villa on the summit. The allegorical road movie about Californian hippies has found its metaphorical equivalent in the motifs of Naoya Hatakeyama's S/ast series. The highly esteemed photographer in his Japanese homeland visualises the intermittent breath of the earth in moments of explosive discharge. A quarry in the north of the country is the scene of the last seconds in the life of the wounded, dying landscape falling out of nature. When Hatakeyama moved to Tokyo, he discovered the endangered, but voracious giant − the city − from the air and from the subterranean sewage system as an anonymous, populated desert − yet there is no life in it.
