Isaac Azzopardi is a Maltese artist currently living and working in London. His practice uses painting, moving image and text, and is preoccupied with landscape, historicity and place. Constantly speculating ways to construct landscapes, he is interested in the perceived historicity, or lack therein, of place, especially when placed in context of bodies, affect and memory.
Isaac Azzopardi
In the mid-2010s, I was struck by how strongly I felt about the widespread construction that was suddenly reshaping my island home, Malta, which fuelled an erasure of heritage and urban spaces.
My practice started to take shape around my relationship with the island, experimenting with ideas about the historicity of the stone—how the island was amplified within its high walls of fortified cities and the same limestone that made the island also came to make the cities, fortresses, palaces, churches, homes, farms, fountains, sculptures; the buildings reflected the landscape, because they were made of the very same material as the landscape, like the hewn palaces of Petra.
I progressively developed different strands of work that circle around historicity of landscape, and memory and affect on landscapes. Underlying my practice is the need for a repetitive attempt at creating a sense of place, to capture a vision of the landscape as it lives in my head.
Painting and image making is an important strand of my practice, and currently is focussed on text paintings, developed in tandem with concrete poetry and other writing about memory and place written for and around the dissertation. It began as an attempt to inject narrative and storytelling in my images.
Recently, I started to experiment with moving image work that enquires how the body and the landscape relate.
if I were a stone and you were the sea
if I were a stone and you were the sea
if I were a stone and you were the sea
![[untitled]](https://res.cloudinary.com/rca2020/image/upload/f_webp,h_1280,w_1920,c_fill,g_auto,q_auto/v1/rca2021/60c66d80101fec8c9fa8ea91-134430?_a=AXAH4S10)
if I were a stone and you were the sea
The stone is a vessel, and so is the sea.
These stone-shaped sea paintings are landscapes, and form part of a broader exploration of speculative historicity of landscapes.
Here, the focus is on embodying the elements of landscape; the narrative invites you to step in for the stone and the sea.
Medium:
Oil on panelSize:
60x40cm (approx)Moving Landscape
Moving Landscape shows myself throwing stones in a valley in Malta. It further explores an understanding of Jane Bennet’s concept of assemblage: if I am in landscape, I am landscape; my affect on landscape is intrinsically equal to that of any other element.
And so ‘Moving Landscape’ is both an action and a condition; I am moving landscape and I am moving landscape.
Karen Barad asks “Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture?” Her thinking helps affirm my conception of landscape as a canvas for historicity of affect, change, mutation.
The rock I throw will be remembered as the landscape is marked by the collision of my stone against another, as well as the now-moved stone having been positioned elsewhere within the immense composition of the valley. The performativity of the gesture lies in the implied and imagined consequences that the smallest affect on landscape, and the immensity of that affect once you move away from an anthropocentric perspective.
Medium:
Moving ImageSize:
02:26Isaac Azzopardi Dissertation MA Contemporary Art Practice — Dissertation for MA Contemporary Art Practice, at the Royal College of Art London, by Isaac Azzopardi