The Other Planet – ongoing project
by Marianne Csaky

How will the generations coming after ours remember us – maybe already on another planet? What kind of historical and personal memories will we have in the future?
Inventories of losses, or narratives of a victorious survival? During the months of the Covid lockdown I watched hundreds of hours of archive footage and thousands of documentary photographs of events, news, and stories of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is hardly surprising that most of the news was about wars, custody, and escape.

How will all this be remembered in a world from where the Earth’s history can be observed not solely from the point of view of humans but also of all living creatures, animals, plants, and even of rocks and of the entire eco-system? Will they inherit our traumas, the consequences of all we did, still carrying them when the concrete faces and figures have long faded away and turned into silhouettes? Or will only the codes go down to them?

The project is composed of various groups of works. In the first series of works I combine digital photo montages of archive and contemporary news footage and press photos with charcoal drawings. In the drawings, the animals participate in, suffer, or observe the events documented in the montages.
The second group of works is based on photos I took at the Belgian coast of the North Sea, where in late September at sunset the world of another planet with its alien atmospheric conditions emerges from the lights. Each photo shows a major event in the 20th and 21st centuries in the form of embroidered black silk appliques.

The third group of photo and video works has emerged from fragments of personal histories, fading, resurfacing, and then rewritten. The gestures of the human bodies and the way they arrange themselves in groups preserve and reflect the code that animates them.