CLUB

A work for LAND ART MONGOLIA 2018, 5TH BIENNAL LAM 360°, in the steppe of Khentii Aimag, near Murun Sum village, with exhibit in Ulaan Bator Art National Gallery.

(from exhibition catalog):

As an artist and architect focused on landscape, Michele Giacobino is concerned about the land, the ways in which humans use it, and in particular the question of which humans decide how the land is to be used. In this work for Land Art Mongolia 2018, the purely visual association between the green rolling grasslands of Mongolia and the game of golf is straightforward. But this artwork is not about golf as a sport, or about the enormous areas of land, and water resources, devoted to golf courses around the world. The title Club refers instead to the ‘club’ of G20 nations (20 of the nations with ‘developed’ or more powerful economies) whose attitudes largely determine the use of natural resources – including the land – around the world. So, in Club, the use of the flags of the twenty nations refers to he globalized culture of the G20. As Giacobino points out, the homogeneity of globalized culture leads people to seek out the unusual, ‘exotic’ or ‘undeveloped’, adjectives often applied to Mongolia. Since there are also artists from almost 20 nations (not G20) in this edition of Land Art Mongolia, come to experience the land and its people, Club can also be understood as a reflection on the artists and Biennial workshop. Flags are an ambiguous device, of course, referring not simply to the marker of the golfer’s ambition, but also to the territorial ambition and claims of nation states to possess the land. Giacobino’s artwork was present in the landscape for only a few days, and the artist was careful to return the soil to the places from which it had been displaced.

Many thanks to Lewis Biggs

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