In Voyage to the Orient (1851), the French writer and poet Gérard de Nerval creates a very interesting fold between the narrator and the main character.

Nerval is the narrator and Gérard - presumably an idealistic and naive version of himself - is the hero of the book. The Dark Atlas project uses Nerval's book and his dilution of reality and fiction as its departure point.

The figure of an unknown Traveller is explored. He is the spectral presence that permeates the narrative of this body of work. Places where the action takes place share a certain quality of irreality, mystery and difficulty of localization. They seem to live outside our plane of existence.

Building upon the study of this book, and the cultural context in which it was written, the artist constructed a body of work that critically examined notions of Orientalism and the figure of the Romantic traveller. In this video piece in particular, the concept approached is of the rückenfigur, a cloaked figure always seen from the back, recurrent in Romantic painting, most notably in Caspar David Friedrich’s work. We follow him relentlessly walking through different unidentified landscapes. The video footage was captured in China, India and Nepal, filmed in a wide-angle view, akin to a third-person videogame.

As in Nerval’s book, the real and the imagined become indistinguishable.

Rückenfigur, 2018
video, 29 min. color