Giulia Privitelli reviews Elka’s Flying Sculptures and wonders whether these sculptures represent a social commentary on the way we treat our environment.

If, for a moment, we could forget what an exhibition gallery is and what it is meant for, then, perhaps, we could better understand what the project, Flying Sculptures by French and Belgian artists Elodie Laurent and Stéphane Kiszak, is all about.

If we could forget that, then we might as well describe the works, not as photographs hanging on white-washed walls, but as slits in white-washed walls, with us on the inside looking out onto a frame of what is, in truth, a much bigger picture.

Thankfully, however, it’s not just about us looking. It is also about immersing ourselves, or trying to at least, into an experience which has quite literally no strings attached.

The somewhat familiar, yet desolate and abandoned landscapes are inhabited, not by humans, but by gravity-defying medusae of ran-domly ‘found’, items. They hover impossibly on the spot, sticking out painfully like a sore thumb from the setting that surrounds them.

Sure, it’s a neat trick, intriguing at the least, but is that the extent to where our questioning will take us? Is it about digital manipulation, editing, or any complex photo-graphic techniques involved?

Perhaps, we do need an exhibition, after all, to acknowledge our own necropolis of garbage

No, not really. It would be, in fact, an unfair critique if we were to stop there – an incomplete appreciation of the exhibition.

This is because such questions only address the printed photograph – the final product, so to speak – when they should in fact, address the entire creative process.

To do this, however, we must take a couple of steps back along the path of the artists’ journey. Back to May, 2014, when the artist-duo, known as Elka, decided to travel the world armed only with a 10-kilogram back-pack each, photographic equipment and a truckload worth of time. Not what one would expect, is it?

We must remind ourselves that, as mobile artists, Elka has little material, if anything at all, to work with. When one is in possession of practically nothing, it is as the saying goes: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” That is how a discarded item could potentially become a fragment of the ‘masterpiece’.

Naturally, a change in status, also, brings along a change in value. The tricky part is interpret-ing the meaning of that newly-assigned value.

Plastic tubes, fishing nets, tyres, rubber wires, metal cans – you name it – they all lost their original meaning the moment they lost their proper function.

And the viewer is left there wondering and suspended in thought, half-way between solid ground and a vast sky of endless possibilities.

It is the latter, the endless sky of possibilities, which makes me wonder whether Elka is forking out some bold comment on the manner in which we treat our environment.

The sculptures have an out-worldly, almost surreal, feel to them, which makes them strik-ingly similar to the debris and weightless junk, to put it crudely, orbiting our beloved planet.

This is the degree of our unchecked development and we do not even have to look that far. Have we already forgotten the estimated 90 tonnes worth of waste which has been presumably cleared from Lower Fort St Elmo last November, or the illegal dumping sites which tend to bloom from time to time in rural areas and along coastlines?

If Elka claims to be daily wandering rural and urban landscapes, surely it must not have been an impossible task to gather a number of found items during their sojourn in Malta. Perhaps, we do need an exhibition, after all, to acknowledge our level of accomplishment – our own necro-polis of garbage. Elka has even given it a soundtrack... the disturbing noise of nature in pain.

If we need a dictionary to understand the vocabulary of the Flying Sculptures photographs, it is possibly because we are so oblivious to the impact which our daily human activity has on the environment.

We are surprised when nature starts to act strange, so we desperately seek to scientifically explain all phenomena. I wonder how many of us will have the same approach when viewing Elka’s works.

I wonder how many will go rummaging for that dictionary and how many of us will simply walk back out of the gallery, not even bothering to give it a second thought.

The Flying Sculptures exhibition by atists-in-residence Elka Duo, is curated by Patrick Fenech and runs at St James Cavalier, Valletta, until today.

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