Artists: Olga Sabko, Lucy Orta, Max Fouchy

Curator: Elena Posokhova

Scientists involved in the research: Dr. Jorge Terrados, marine biologist and ecologist,  Magdalena Vicens Fornés,  curator of Jardí Botànic de Sóller

Artists involved in the production: Ruben Solar Ru, Anastasia Egorova, Arina Antonova

About “I Landed”.

I Landed is an exhibition dedicated to the natural and cultural heritage of the Meditarenean Islands. The exhibition was simultaneously held on four different islands in local major art institutions. The purpose of “I Landed” is to raise awareness of the ecological issues the islands are facing, and to show the uniqueness of each location trough the artists eyes.

Method. 

Five artists: Lucy Orta, Edgar Sarin, Max Fouchy, Olga Sabko and Klitsa Antoniou had participated in MARLANDS art residency. Each of them has visited of the 5 Isalnds: Malta, Sicily, Mallorca, Cyprus and Ibiza to meet local scientists and cultural arts artists. The result of those collaborations were five art projects.

Each artist created a protocol for their work, so it can be repeated and recreated on the next Island. This allowed to initiate a new, more sustainable way of curating an exhibition, and to create a link between the Islands’ art communitites.

On each location, the exhibition ‘I Landed’ puts in the focus the project created by the artist who visited the island during their residency.

Title. 

The name of the exhibition is inspired by the first message each of the artists sent arriving to Islands for their residency, – “I Landed”.

It also is a wordplay. It’s meant to show, that artists haven’t only visited the islands, but also have been “Islanded’ – got acquainted with the place, its heritage and the local way of living.

I Landed. Mallorca.

‘I landed. Mallorca’ is an exhibition that allows to discover Mallorca, trough the artsits’ eyes.

On focus is the works by Lucy Orta and Olga Sabko, created during their MARLANDS residency in Palma, Mallorca.

With participation of Max Fouchy.

Artworks in focus. 

Lucy Orta’s ‘The Lost Species: Sphâ’ intends to symbolically restore the ancient spiritual majesty of the islands’ ecosystem. 

Known under many guises as the sea-calf, sea wolf, fin-foot, monk, or phoca, the monk seal Monachus monachus has occupied a special place across Mediterranean culture, myth and folklore yet it has been consistently persecuted throughout history. The recent deliberate killing by fishermen, alongside the destruction of its natural habitats due to tourism and urbanisation, has pushed the marine mammal to the verge of extinction, with around 400 couples recorded across the Mediterranean. The title of this work is taken from the Sanskrit sphâ, meaning to swell up. The sculptural representation of a beached seal (adult and child) have been moulded using the traditional technique of hand-coiled terracotta chamotte pots.

For her installation “Garden of the Past. Garden of the Future” Olga Sabko invited Mallorca inhabitants to create a collective garden bringing a small specimen from the personal gar – dens of islanders to contemplate its growth together. The project includes an installation created in collaboration with local public and ceramic artists, from Mallorca, a series of engravings and a video-art piece.

In this work, the garden symbolises a zone of gathering and exchanging energies, where “people live with nature and for nature, and nature shares generously its resources”.