Shangri La 8, 2012

Shangri La 2012 0911

Video: https://vimeo.com/54024225 Place: Sweden. Material: Stockings, styrofoam, beach balls. Category: Nature art installation. Concept: Unbelievably, just at this site, a main road between two cities used to be situated. But  not such a long time ago, the road collapsed, and disappeared into a hole in the earth, a hole that quickly was filled with water. Today a pond makes this place nice and peaceful. SHANGRI LA 8 might look like a paradise, but it is a dystopia; an idea of a future where beautiful things make us forget and steal our attention. In this place, gazes are turned away from you, eyes are shut. It is a future where everything looks so nice, but nobody is given an identity. It is a world in abundance, where we freely can do whatever we like – floating around like melting ice on water. This is a dystopia where borders between past, present and future have fallen apart, in a similar way as a road not so long ago just disappeared at this site. Shangri La is normally a word for a utopia – paradise. Some say that you may find Shangri La in the centre of Earth, some say you will find it in most remote areas in the Himalayas.

If there is, indeed, a paradise in the Himalayas, then it has surely changed dramatically with the melting glaciers and ABC- clouds.The awareness of these circumstances has been present during the whole process and has been crucial for narratives in this art piece /Marie Gayatri. Information about ABC clouds:http://www.rrcap.unep.org/abc/ or http://www-abc-asia.ucsd.edu/