REVIEW BY URBANAUTICA
Language is one of the first tools our human species evolved. It's about the ability to vocalize and translate the visible into words, into names, into sound images. These sounds reverberate in space, and they mark it. They become memory, poetry, epic, and then subsequently writing. Different sounds turn into signs—accumulation, deposit, tradition, time. Therefore an expression, also of power, order, of rules. As many symbols that do divide, displace and limit. Yet some spaces remained "public," shared, and accessible throughout history, thus manifesting a community being. It's a social, spiritual, tribal, or political body. These agorae exist in every civilization, idealized in different shapes, sizes, representations, constructions, and architectures. The Chinese one is no exception, and Laura Egger shows us some of them. And it shows us people intent on playing different roles, from prayer to recreation. Yet there is a public space by definition, which is nature before it became something other than us, and the species drew a line between their human condition and that of other living species through the invention of another language. The series "Immortal at the River" shows a progression from a seemingly uninhabited forest to a mineralized square marked by local propaganda. In this sequence, we find a possible summary of the transformation from a natural state to an anthropocentric destiny. And one wonders whether this public space is, in fact, public. Is it open to a different cultural thought? Laura Egger makes another visual foray into China, a country that stands as a theatre for the changes of the new millennium. And she stimulates us to observe them by recovering the words of the ancient poet Yang Shen that still work like a balm on human aims. "Pride and fall turn all at once unreal": do we need to add more?
