Piccolo Greenland
Since the second half of the 20th century, we have witnessed a significant growth in the number of states through a process of political fragmentation. Ibro Hasanović, has launched the idea of establishing an independent State on a huge iceberg which has become detached from a glacier somewhere near the North Pole...
Piccolo Greenland is a reticular work made up of various different elements: a video, photographs, a sound piece and an Internet site (Datascape). It is immediately obvious that the question is not strictly concerned with political science, as there is no mention of a population, a government or institutions. Of this State, we only know the type of territory, an island, hostile and sterile by nature, floating at will in international waters. With the help of figures and diagrams, a screen - linked to an Internet site - shows the position and the meteorological data of this State in real time. All these measuring instruments continually remind us that we can control nothing on this island, neither the weather nor its movements, nor its inevitable dissolution into the ocean.
Distilling this statistical data by associating it with natural sounds, the artist creates an evolving sound landscape that forms at the same time as the history of the island. Beyond the aspect of human adventure, the conquest of a territory is also a question of symbolic images. In photographs, a man brandishing a flag often features as proof. Through the figure of pioneer, these images have always contributed to uniting and strengthening a community, defining the contours of a collective identity. By playing on the usual staging of this imagery, Ibro Hasanović introduces an element of doubt into his self-portraits as a hero. In this way, he sustains the unsettling tension that the bounds of credibility instil between fiction and reality.
The work immerses us into a world of radical, raw poetry. In the thick of the fog, the eye hears the bell and the ear sees the flapping of the flag. The wandering of the isolated man responds to the drifting island, not knowing where to plant his flag on this territory with no horizon. In an ultimate and desperate attempt to exist at the heart of this void where everything is the same, the ambivalence of the relationship of man to this promised land, dreamed of but unwelcoming, is expressed by the furious gesture with which he takes possession of it.
Olivier Rignault
Paris, May 2012.