Through several centuries, there have been different statues erected around the world. These statues vary in sizes and what they represent. Photographer Fabrice Fouillet embarked on a tour to study and take photographs of the biggest and most imposing statues in the world; A project he named Colosses. The project brings about a change in how these monuments are viewed, in other words, the idea of the project is not entirely to capture images of the statues or show off their sizes or the symbol they represent. The project however is to show these figures in the environment they are in and how they fit into the landscape and their connections to their immediate surroundings. Colosses is a study of the landscape in which monuments and commemorative statues are erected, and tends to bring out another perspective from which these symbolic representations can be viewed.

There can be different reasons why statues are erected and these include political, ideological or religious. Most times, statues are erected to keep alive the memory of a person or event and with the passing of the years, the statue will eventually become a symbol for the community.

As the series Colosses is all about the landscapes in which these statues are sited, we get to see the connections these gigantic declarations have with their immediate environment. A lot of statues were erected around the world in the 1990s with many of them located in Asia. Right now the world’s highest statue is undergoing construction in India and it will go as high as 182 meters which will be almost twice the size of the statue of liberty.

For this project, Fouillet took photographs of the statues outside their surroundings totally detaching them from their natural environment thereby giving a wider view and perspective to how these huge monuments fit into the landscape. He captures the monuments from a perspective we don’t usually get to see every day. Some of these monuments include the Dai Kanon in Sendai, Japan which he framed from a few blocks away. Christ the King monument in Swiebudzin, Poland was framed from behind. For some of the monuments, Fouillet shoots wide enough to capture the details of the things in the environment of these looming monoliths. For example, in the image of the Grand Byakue Kannon in Takazai, Japan, there is a Coca-Cola machine just down the hill away from the monument. According to Fouillet, his intention is to take out the monument from its regular touristic and religious setting which we are already used to.

So far, the project has spanned through ten countries and Fouillet thinks the project would not be complete if he does not capture the monument of Genghis Kahn riding on horseback which is located on the banks of the Tuul River in Mongolia and the Sardar Patel statue which is under construction in India. For the biggest statue in the world at the moment, the Spring Temple Buddha in Henan, China, Fouillet said he was unable to find a satisfying angle.

Domestication of Pyramids by Magdalena Jetelová are pyramid-sculptures, covered by volcanic ashes, and have been shown at the Museum of Applied Arts / Vienna, Martin-Gropius-Bau / Berlin, National Museum of Contemporary Art / Warsaw, Irish Museum of Modern Art / Dublin, Forum Kunst Rottweil and other art spaces.

The Viennese Museum of Applied Arts is a typical example of Ringstrasse architecture: an elegant, richly ornamented Neo-Renaissance building with an inner peristyle hall and galleries. Upon entering the building, the visitor finds himself/herself, surprisingly, in a darkened, curved space: soon he/she discovers that he/she is standing under large, slanted scaffolding. He/she instinctively walks to the right, where there is a way out. When he/she returns to the daylight, he/she finds himself/herself in the Museum hall, standing next to a thirteen-meter high tilted wall covered in red silica sand. The wall slices the inner space of the Museum diagonally across two floors, slashing razor-like through pillars and balustrades up to the ceiling. The wall, tilted at a 45° angle and with a base thirty-five meters long, is a fragment of one side of a pyramid which could continue in the exterior of the Museum building. A space on a scale which greatly exceeds the size of the host building is inserted into the museum’s interior. Despite its dimensions, it is only a fragment of a whole known to us, which in an imaginary way continues beyond the borders of the Museum building and which we can mentally reconstruct as a pyramid.

Domestication primarily stems from the fact that we can already imagine it based on the fragment we have at our disposal because we have become well acquainted with its form in our minds. On the entirely specific level, domestication—taming—can be seen in the possibility of walking around the pyramid from all sides, from the inside as well as from the outside; taking a look at its base from the gallery above, experiencing it from a perspective that people were to be denied. This, however, does not change anything about the fact that the essence of the form is mental, not physical. The entire pyramid is only realized through thought.

The intersection of the eastern archetypal monument—the pyramid—and its absolute geometry with‘humanized’ western architecture, its small details and scale, raises questions concerning the nature of our culture, whereby our stable coordinates which anchor us in the world become relative. Other pyramids have been constructed at various locations in Europe, but only in Vienna is the pyramid physically accessible both from the inside and outside; in Warsaw and Berlin the surface of the structure can be observed from the outside, which, because it is covered with volcanic ashes, evokes the feeling of a full compact mass, poured into the form of a heap. The confrontation of the eastern monument and European cultural history takes place differently each time, and yet on the same principle. The domestication of absolute architecture takes place in our minds.

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