FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ Thanks so much for making the time to talk with us. I want to start from the title of your project and the two publications Across/Ground. What does it mean to move across ground?

LUKAS FELZMANN Both titles imply movement as well the opposite of movement. When I started photographing for this project, I needed a way to connect to the landscape. The most natural way for me was to stand somewhere and look and then move. I needed to feel present and anchored on the ground first. One of the two books is called Ground and the images in it are a mapping but also an entry point. I was trying to find my way into this vast territory, which is California in this project. To make work in each county I had to physically be in each part of the state, to be present there, and to find something around me or on the ground that is interesting and can also be merged into an interesting image. Intersections of culture and nature, surfaces worked by the flow of time, place becoming specific and universal at the same time. Once I established that, or I think I established that, as I could never see my film-based images in the field, something interesting happened: I know that I'm there; I know that I feel the ground and I can see the work, the area around me. Then I started wandering, without any particular guidance other than roads or paths or maps that would draw me somewhere. The invisible grid of the counties fell away at this point. So Across/Ground to me, is kind of a two-folded thing. It means being really present, being in one spot and being grounded — and at the other end of it, almost because of that, being able to move freely across the territory.

KOOZ Did you ever conceive in terms of one having to look across first and then looking down at the ground, or does one look first down to the ground and then across? How does one ‘read’ the photographic and literary work?

LFThey are both the same; both part of looking and yet they are different in their directions. Both views need each other and are present in each other. When I photograph I do not think about these things. I follow my intuition. But when you make a book the process becomes more intellectualised, controlled and thought out. Yet it's also a bit like having a child, in that once it's born, published, out there, you really lose control of it. I tend to design my books very meticulously myself and control them up to the printing. But once a book is out there, it can be looked at however that goes; often backwards. I sequenced it for that too. I wanted the two books to be independent volumes as well as a pair. That's why the packaging is a belly-band that falls away as you open them. The two are connected with this almost umbilical wrapping around them that falls away as you open them up. They are the same size but different in content and feel.

KOOZ It's funny that you talk about it like a birth, having experienced that feeling in producing a book. It goes out in the world, it will live its own life, but it's somehow always a baby — because there's so much knowledge that goes into it, a lot of effort which is put out into the world.

FGThere is a nice connection there between photography and birth in Spanish: colloquially, to give birth is dar a la luz, to give to the light.

KOOZ That's beautiful. The light ‘gives’ us the photograph as well. I'd like to hear about the kind spaces to which you bring light — because they really are liminal spaces, in a way, within the 58 counties of California. What informed your focus?

LF The conceptual framework was the 58 counties but it was really the grid that interested me and I wanted to explore. I was looking for one place while finding a way to go everywhere in this big territory. I knew that I did not want to visit the much-photographed places like Yosemite or the Redwoods or Muscle Beach in Venice. California has been photographed more than many other places. I didn't want to try to rephotograph these ‘greatest hits’ on the contrary; I believe that every place is interesting if you pay enough attention to it. And so the counties were just a way to divide the territory up, using a grid that already exists. Some of the county borders are political, some are geographical, and many are just arbitrary lines in the landscape, and that suited me well. For me, it was just this system of invisible organisation, with the idea that I would go into each one of these squares or rectangles or whatever shape they are, and try to make some work there.

FGThat reminds me of something John Cage wrote: If you look at something and you're bored in the first minute, look at it for five minutes; if you're still bored, look at it for twenty minutes. If you keep doing that, you'll find it becomes interesting. That's, again, the radical nature of your vision, Lukas. In our age of spectacle — with faster cuts and image montages streaming (or screaming) at us — you're going for the non-spectacular, for the intimate, intuitive, personal. You reawaken our encounter with the familiar, the local. I think that maybe our sense of ethics develops from our relationship with the ordinary, not so much from the spectacular.

LF Forrest just had a new book published called Mojave Ghost, a really amazing collection of poetry and writings. As inspiration while writing it, he walked along the San Andreas Fault — please correct me if I'm wrong. In a way this sounds like a really dramatic idea; you're following the fault line where the continent is shifting and plates are being pushed underneath each other. But when you walk it, you mostly don't see any of that. You know it is there and out of that you created this really wonderful work.

FGIt’s true, you can walk a long way “along the fault” without seeing anything remarkable. Or hike the Mojave Desert for hours before you come to a bent arroyo or a line of palm trees against a hill that gives evidence of the fault line. Nevertheless, at levels that humans can't register, the rocks beneath us are pulsing and humming with the spinning Earth; with volcanic and tectonic forces. The earth is generating its own music. And although humans have used the earth as if it were just an endless source for extraction, I think it's critical to our survival, and to the survival of billions of species, for us to learn to pay attention, as Lukas does, to exactly what it is we stand on, both physically and ethically.

KOOZ Absolutely; these thoughts define our fourth issue, Terra Infirma. The ground holds an enormous value in terms of what we connect to as humans. And as you say, we're so obsessed with the spectacular that we perhaps don't find interest in what, in what we tread over every day; personally, I feel that I'm walking on too much asphalt. How can we redirect our attention to something which is so primordial — somehow rooting ourselves back into what it means to be human and to be alive — and also so important for our planetary ecosystem today.

LFThe place where architects traditionally connect with the ground would be the foundation. And I was just thinking about these words — ground, foundation, we could find others — if you just listen to language, it tells you by association how important those notions are and how they impact much of our lives. I included a little dictionary section in one book, which is perhaps not a particularly inventive thing to do. But I was surprised, when looking up the word ground, how many different directions — metaphorically, psychologically and emotionally — that word takes. How extensively we've used the concept of the ground. Language itself tells us a lot about that.

KOOZ Absolutely; indeed our next issue Polyglot is on language! I’m keen to hear more about the means of mapping and of looking at specific localities; for instance the images of Kern, in Ground, where the ground really takes the forefront, with dozens of oil rigs in the background. To what extent is the book a reflection on not only California and the different ways of observing landscape, but also on global systems of extraction?

LF Yes, I hope that it does both. My very first book — called Landfall — didn't include any place names; it is a journey through a landscape. I often felt that if I say, “this is such-and-such place,” once the people read that name, they don't think any further; they assume they know what the image is about. But over the years, as I've worked much I decided that an image is the most powerful when it is both; very specific and metaphorical at once. So California, in this work, is almost like a stage. It's a place where the drama takes place, that drama called life takes place all over the world — yet it is different because of different circumstances in different locations. The essence of it — which is that we're not taking care of the earth, that the sense of control is one-sided and misguided, resulting in the many issues that we're facing today — it is my hope that the work speaks to this larger context. It is a contemporary, maybe unformed but urgent feeling towards a place. Originally, when I put in a grant request for this work, it was called A Conceptual Atlas of California. I removed the word California, because I was afraid that its apprehension would be limited by that place name. But I really believe it's important to connect to both, it's hopefully about every place, as well as about California.

KOOZ Forrest, I was curious about your perspective; how did you approach the notion of locality? How did your texts deal with this idea of wanting to be specific but also talking about broader issues?

FGWell, one of the things we haven't mentioned yet is how, when we're talking about the particularity of place, we're also talking about time. Because when we look at the ground, we aren’t really seeing something inert. The ground is alive; what’s below surges to the surface. What’s on the surface sinks. The past is rising, and we see the most obvious traces of it in the fossils that show up in Lukas's photographs. Meanwhile, the present– like those abandoned foundations we see in Ground, is constantly being subsumed, covered with mud and earth, disappearing. Those processes are ongoing in geologic time, along with even more powerful tectonic processes in which, along the San Andreas Fault for example, huge swaths of earth are grinding against each other. When we're walking across the ground, we're seeing a palimpsest of time, of the past and the present revealing each other. That's fascinating to me, that what's under the surface is not still; that in Lukas's photographs, which take their own time to develop, there are traces of what was there in another time— structures people built that fell apart, abandoned paths, tire tracks. When I ‘walk’ a place, whether it's the city or the desert, I like to think of what has been there before me. I like to feel the ghosts of that place. And Lukas's photographs are very haunted by ghosts.

LF How do you feel about the sense of the place as being very particular, yet also ambiguous? How do you deal with that in your poetry?

FGWell, I thought what I could offer was a look at that invisible web of under-surface tectonic activity in the precise locations of your photographs. I thought I might be able to deepen the viewer's sense of looking by particularising a specific locus in terms of its topographical, geological, and environmental attributes. Is this a place where we’d find a certain species of salamander? What kind of rock, what kind of underground forces are associated with this very specific locality? What invisible events contribute to the visible events in each photograph. So I was looking to make observations distinguishing the multiplicity of forces at work in the mesh that is any landscape.

KOOZ As pertinent side note, Forrest, it’s worth noting that you have a degree in geology, right? Your texts really are a mix between poetry and science. How do you negotiate between those two languages — does one fuel the other?

FG Poetry can draw vocabulary from lots of different methodologies, concepts, and disciplines. In this cultural moment– when our computers are correcting our grammar and directing our sentences into the most conventional patterns; when people have given up handwriting and stopped crafting sentences longer than tweets; when everywhere around us our technologies are reducing the fullness of our language into blips and summaries– poetry can provide solace. It can expand our vocabulary not only for feeling but for looking. I'm trying to draw from as wide a range of lexicons and fields as I can, to retool our capacity for articulating what it means to look at something. To feel it. That's just what Lukas' photographs are doing too. Instead of giving himself to spectacular landscapes, he’s drawn to the ordinary, an ordinary that begs us to reconsider it, to re-engage with it. In Lukas’ photographs, the viewer has to become involved in the looking; the image isn’t the sort that is just presented to our passive witness. We're drawn into the photograph, our imaginations are engaged, we become a part of it. And I think language can do the same thing, in comparable ways.

I've been influenced by a body of literature that came out of southern India and connects with a very contemporary philosophy called Object Oriented Ontology. In Southern India two-thousand years ago, there was a historic blossoming of literature called Sangam that lasted for some 300 years. In the large body of poems written then called akam, it was considered not only unethical, but impossible to write about the self or human subjectivity without writing about the landscape which was understood to be involved in human feelings. That’s a developed point of view two thousand years ahead of our struggle now to forge an account of our relationship with the non-human.

KOOZ This notion that the human is always embedded in nature, without separation from the natural world, is something which, in Western culture, we have never held. Never more than in the last decades, we have told ourselves the story of the human being disconnected from and taking over the landscape. Even when we make an effort, it is from a very anthropocentric perspective. You mention the 58 counties, home to a number of indigenous populations, and whose relationship to the ground is challenged by some of the borders which have been defined in the last years. Can you talk about how you approached those lands and territories, both in terms of image and text?

LF I don't think it informed the photographic practice of making this work which is not just the two books but a much larger archive of this land. If you look at the names of the counties you realise that many are based on indigenous names. It’s not something that I feel I grappled with in depth but by listing or calling out the names of the indigenous peoples who lived here was a way to at least acknowledge that there are different layers of histories, languages and usages. I'm just moving across this space as it is now and look; there are many other cultural histories I don't acknowledge. I look at the ghosts that remain there, in a way.

KOOZ What do you mean when you talk about ghosts?

LF I used the word as Forrest already brought it into our conversation earlier; as this wonderful notion that what we see in the landscape is really the past coming back up. I think he even used the word fossil; that what we see is a gigantic fossil of the past processes, organic processes in the earth, of the minerals and materials there. I think of all these visual traces as ghosts; the physical processes of the earth as well as the impact of our control and working of the earth. All those together form a catalogue of ghosts, in a way.

KOOZ Forrest, would you have anything to add here?

FGI think Lukas spoke pretty well for the both of us. I don't want to romanticise previous cultures as though they lived lives of perfectly harmonious coexistence with other cultures, animals, and landscapes. History has shown us that Homo sapiens is an irremediably violent species. But I feel called to recognise those lives — human and non-human — that passed before us and set the stage for our own time here on earth.

KOOZ Going back to the process: Lukas, you mentioned this idea of moving across those sites — how did you move across the sites? The second goes to Forrest: did you see the images and then write a number of texts — did you visit the sites that were photographed, or did you see them only through photography?

FGI’d like to answer first in this case. I was born in California, then moved away and have returned as an adult. Since moving to the Bay Area in 2017, I've been thrilled to get to re-explore the landscape. With my wife Ashwini Bhat, I've been travelling around the state quite a bit. Most recently, we’ve been hiking in stages much of the 650-mile San Andreas fault which has brought us through many of California’s counties. But I was never standing on the exact sites that Lukas photographed. I let the photographs invite me in, as deeply as possible, and I researched the counties, the geology, the flora and fauna of each of those places. I studied maps and images from Google Earth, and tried to come as close as I could — in my mind — to the places where Lukas took his photographs. But I should say: I didn't want to approach “place” from a purely scientific and objective stance. I wanted my imagination to be involved. And I wanted to invite other people into the photograph. So it was an imaginative exercise, too.

LF I was really struck when Forrest’s texts came back. First of all, we didn't know each other before this project; we were introduced by the writer Eliot Weinberger. We then met in my studio, and I basically just gave Forrest my mock-up for the book. I imagined that Forrest would write some kind of essay-poem, maybe. Surprisingly he came back with a poem written specifically for each image. I could tell how well Forrest knows this landscape; but he seems to have found each individual spot, sometimes by naming it, sometimes just by imagining what happens there. In addition he lays the invisible, the fault zones underneath the locations across the photographs by naming them. In a really wonderful way he connected the texts with how I move across.

In my process there are really two ways; one is walking and the other is driving. As I use very heavy camera equipment I don't hike for miles and miles with my camera and a big backpack. California is a gigantic, immense terrain, so making these photographs is very closely connected to driving. The car, even though it is never visible, is another instrument of my photographic practice. When you drive, you see the landscape in a fragmentary way, which can be very interesting — you just see a certain section or something that imprints itself into your imagination; everything around it falls away because you can't quite apprehend it. Then as you stop that image is often not there and the act of looking and searching starts anew. You stop and go, you go out there and walk, back and forth or on a trail or across bridges. Walking is a big part of connecting to the landscape or an urban space but it mostly happens on a different timeline than the actual taking of the photographs, which is more connected to being on the road.

KOOZ That's beautiful, because it connects back to this idea of time? Traveling by car is indeed very different to walking; if you're looking at the in-between and the liminal, walking is a mode of transport which enables one to really engage with it. Would either of you like to add anything before we wrap up?

FGWell, I'd say that Lukas has given us an innovative look at what lies below our feet, and that it's a rare perspective, looking down at a ground we so often take for granted. And it occurs to me that maybe Lukas is saying something similar to what the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: “Don't think; look.” Or maybe Lukas is revising that dictum into: “First look; then thinking will follow.”

LFThank you. One little afterthought: I'm very interested in sculpture and the photographic process, for me, is a sculptural process. Even though I'm creating a two-dimensional image, the process is about being in the landscape and then shrinking the four dimensions of a place down to a two-dimensional image. You have to position yourself in the landscape in relation to something. A landscape versus just land has three parts: there's the sky, there's the ground and there's the observer. In Ground I chose to eliminate the sky and the horizon to focus on this idea of ground.

I think of making books as yet another sculptural process. They are objects that you can hold in your hand, and the sculptural and durational elements are here again. As you're physically turning the pages, time passes. It becomes another kind of movement across, another physical engagement with the landscapes. That's why the books are so important to me. I think of them not as reproductions of the photographs, but as authentic sculptural constructs.

FGThat's beautiful Lukas. Ground itself is an Anglo-Saxon-derived word; other languages don't have the same sense for it. In Spanish, for instance, there's no word that has the same resonance: you can have suelo or tierra, but nothing that has quite the same resonance.

LFIt's different in German. In German we have Grund, which literally means base — interestingly, it also means reason. That's just a nice coincidence.

FGOh, that's fantastic.

KOOZ While in English, you might say that you feel grounded when you feel connected — which I really love, this idea of being grounded, even if very few of us truly are… But if one talks about the relationship to Earth, it's something which we should all truly strive for. That the German language, so beautifully intricate, connects the idea of ground to that of reason doesn't surprise me at all. Thank you both for this fantastic conversation.

FGLukas, a big hug. Thank you, Federica, wonderful.

LFGood to meet you, and thank you for fostering a dialogue across mediums and important ideas.

Bios

Lukas Felzmann is an artist working with photography, installations, and books. Through his travels, the mountains, the coast and deserts of California’s Central Valley have become his extended home ground. Currently he is an affiliated scholar at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. His work has been shown in exhibitions in Europe, Egypt, Columbia, China, and the United States and he recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography. His six previous books are: Landfall, Waters in Between, Swarm, Helix, Gull Juju and Apophenia.

Forrest Gander is a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature. His books, often concerned with ecology and intimacy, include Twice Alive, the desert novel The Trace, and – most recently – Mojave Ghost. He has been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, Best Translated Book Award, as well as fellowships from the Library of Congress, Guggenheim, and US Artists foundations. Gander has often collaborated with artists, including Ann Hamilton, Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, and Eiko & Koma. His essay collection, A Faithful Existence, considers translation and the relation between science and literature.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.