One with Nature [2014]

Naher El Kaleb | Lebanon

Medium: Land Art Photography Installation | Self-portraits printed on recycled paper

“J’écris pour être seul, je photographie pour disparaître”
Denis Roche

Only when you blend with the elements of Nature [Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Self], do you become deserving of the life “She” has bestowed on you.
Life never ceases to remind you that you too one day, will also degrade and vanish into the elements.

“One with Nature” is a Land Art Photography installation of Ad’s self-portraits taken between 2010 and 2013, published in a collection of 28 postcards and introduced end of 2014 at the historic site of “Naher El Kaleb” (The Dog’s river) on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon. 
Ad’s body is uncovered and installed on land and left to be discovered. On Large recycled paper, Ad glued “himself” – his “self” in nature – from the the path of the old footbridge to his grandmother’s family home where he grew up .The natural erosion caused by the water flow, rain, wind and sun, eventually eroded the imprints — rendering Achkar’s soul lost in time and within the elements.  

The documentation of the event and the dispositions of Achkar’s “body” in the space render the land art installation “performative”, and therefore affecting the “now” into which the photographs are received [Phelan, 2010:55]. Thus, photography gives a sense of “performance-presence” that postulate the images into a “temporal space”: there are two temporalities [a “double now”] or rather three constituting the land art: when the self-portraits were originally taken, and then when viewed (during the installation or after degeneration), and the third is the ‘now’ when you are receiving the photos; it was present “here and there”, and is absent “now and then”. The “attest of presence” as Barthes would say, that is, the real that “has been here” [ça a été] , “that’s it” [c’est ça] not much more of a memory rather than “a proof” of what happened or has been happening [Barthes, 1980:176].
“I” becomes “my” “true self” fading [with]in the external reality of being.

“One with Nature” doesn’t only abolish life itself with the degradation of the photos over time, but also wipes away the Love, and everyone could experience the unity of Ad’s body with nature and witness the fusion of the surface of the earth with[in] its skin. And when the photos fade away and no longer become “here”, they disappear forever where no one can testify “the inactual”, there remains “the indifferent Nature” [Payre, 2003:9].