Julius von Bismarck Landscape Painting (Mine), 2025
The photograph is based on images of an Italian mine near Dossena, close to Bergamo. Fine lines appear to crisscross the stone surfaces that make up the cave. Stripped of color, stone and earth are transformed into an abstract representation. The large-format photo series creates an illusion in its mediality and seems to oscillate between historical engraving, painting, and photograph. The work is part of a larger series entitled Landscape which is intended as a continuation of the deconstruction of our understanding of landscape.
In this context, the mine pictured in this work represents the ancient practice of humanity to objectify and strip nature. The mining area of Dossena might be one of the most ancient farming mountains of Bergamo: the ancient cultivation of the area seems to date back to the Bronze Age. Historians believe Romans used to send slaves sentenced to forced labor in the mines for the mineral extraction. Pliny the Elder mentioned Bergamo in his Naturalis Historia as place of calamine extraction and possible location to which he refers as the mine of Dossena - Oltre il Colle. Some of the minerals collected in the mine of Dossena were calamine, Argentiferous galena and starting from the 20th century, fluorite, a mineral used in the glass industry and metallurgy for lowering the melting temperature and for the production of hydrofluoric acid.
Analogous to the works Landscape Painting (Quarry), which were created in a quarry on Lanzarote, and in a reversal of the original intention of landscape representations—i.e., to depict faraway landscapes in a reproducible manner—the artist applies horizontal lines to the cave. The lines of this work do not seek to imitate a three-dimensional landscape, but to transform the real landscape into a surface that appears two-dimensional, into an image of itself. In his choice of subject, Julius von Bismarck draws on the historical use of engravings in colonial contexts and inquires into how Europeans have made the world their own.