The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg

The shortest horror story ever written was published in a 1948 issue of the American science fiction magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories. Written by Frederic Brown, it is only two lines long: ‘The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door.’ Despite the twentieth century giving a name to the Anthropocene – a geological epoch beginning with significant human impact on the natural world – anxieties about the vulnerability of humans in the natural world are a recurrent subject within contemporary culture.

You’ll Find Your Peace with Me is a screening programme of videos from the Mudam collection, organised to accompany Enfin seules. Photographs from the Archive of Modern Conflict. Responding to the exhibition’s presentation of a natural world devoid of human presence, the screening programme features works in which the landscape has been mediated by humans attempting to grapple with fears of alienation, insignificance and powerlessness – rendering the natural world unnatural in order to understand and control it.

The title You’ll find your peace with me is taken from a piece of music in Sven Johne’s Wissower Klinken (2007) dedicated to a nature enthusiast who was crushed to death by rocks falling from his favourite cliff-side vista. Rocks appear again in João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva’s As Pedras Rolantes – The Rolling Stones (2007), seeming to move across the Mojave Desert of their own volition, until it is revealed that they are being pulled by ropes that blend into the desert landscape.

Manipulation of the natural world is also apparent in Raphaël Zarka’s Gibellina Vecchia (2010), which documents Il Grande Cretto (1985–89) a concrete sculpture by Italian artist Alberto Burri (b. Città di Castello; d. 1995, Nice) that covers hundreds of meters of Sicilian hillside. Melvin Moti points to more psychological interventions in The Black Room (2005), setting an interview with French surrealist poet Robert Desnos (b. Paris, 1900; d. 1945, Terezin) to a panning shot of the Roman Villa Agrippa (circa. 21 – 16 B.C.E, Boscotrecase) whose murals represent a stylistic shift from trompe-l’oeil to depictions of nature rooted in the imaginary.

An atmosphere of anxiety towards the natural world is cultivated by João Penalva in Kitsune (2000), which depicts fog clearing across a desolate landscape as two men trade disquieting stories about a shapeshifting fox spirit. With Forte! (2010), Mark Lewis choreographs a scene of terror in the Italian Alps, his camera, perched in a helicopter with a drone-like detached focus, descends upon Forte di Bard as its occupants flee down the mountain. Island (2008)* by Fiona Tan depicts the sparse landscape of Sweden’s Gotland island, narrated by the uneasy inner thoughts of person in solitary retreat.

Mudam Collection. You’ll Find Your Peace with Me is an online screaming programme. For best viewing conditions, enable audio and use full screen mode.