[Summer 2025]

Landscape Depressions
by Marie Perrault

[EXCERPT]

Janis Rafa, a Greek-born artist based in Amsterdam, is known for her multimedia installations, sculptures, drawings, and films. This exhibition featured a selection of video works from the last ten years that foreground relationships between humans and animals. Pointing her camera toward the spaces where these relationships are expressed and the devices that frame them, Rafa examines the nature of this cohabitation. She approaches these shared spaces in order not to characterize and situate them but to uncover the complex relationships with animals that are revealed in certain specific cases.

Rafa is particularly interested in settings involving companion animals. The short video Waiting For The Time To Pass (2021) shows a dog shut into a car whining as it waits for its master – a common situation. The car interior, a real barrier that drastically reduces the dog’s range of action, becomes an apparatus that keeps it at a distance, similar to structures in society such as aquariums, zoos, stalls, and kill pens.

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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 129 – FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Janis Rafa, Landscape Depressions]

Artist and curator Marie Perrault is interested in questions about land and nature. She has written essays and reviews for Ciel variable, Vie des arts, Esse, and Espace art actuel, among others. She curated the Triennale Banlieue! 2022, titled Interrègnes, which dealt with connections between humans and nature in the peri-
urban context.