Under the title Weltraum (Space), Guido Baselgia spent several years investigating the north of Finland and Norway between the Arctic Circle and the Barents Sea. Prehistory and the present touch each other spatiotemporally in the eventless and karstic moraine landscape: nature before or after humans?

The long-conventionalized tradition of landscape representation should be deconstructed using an abstract and elementary language. A decline in photography to the most elementary basics, to the zero point, in a sense as a response to the common flood of images. How to find a relevant image? The supposed outside view of a barren, inherently “empty” world, but thanks to photography, mysteriously ambiguous, is transformed into a mental image.

“Here the state of a primeval continent is revealed, like in a book of earth history whose first and last pages are opened at the same time.” Guido Baselgia

“The elementality connects the landscape of rock and water with today's increasingly rare original photography made of silver, barite and water. Motif and medium are material relatives, but also present witnesses to the past.” Matthias Haldemann

Published on the occasion of the 2004 exhibition at Kunsthaus Zug.