Anina Brisolla

What do we humans do after having destroyed this world? We fly to another planet and colonize it. And what is the first thing we do there? We stake out land, put up fences, and take possession. That is roughly how you could describe the narrative of Anina Brisolla’s series, entitled prospect.

Images of galaxies, stars, and planets that have been generated with simulation software serve as the basis for her drawings. The Berlin-based artist also uses material from NASA. The American space agency regularly issues strikingly beautiful images of other worlds to the general public. Very few people are aware that these images are interpretations of raw data that has been sent to Earth from satellites. To create them, NASA employs illustrators and artists who do nothing else but produce downright kitschy renderings. These advertising images are reminiscent of the appealing visualizations in the real estate developer sales brochures, who use them to advertise construction projects that are yet to be built.

Anina Brisolla subtly draws her fences, which are themselves based on researched images, onto these portrayals of a projected future. The prospect series deals with the hopes and dreams of humankind in the Anthropocene, which—shaped by doomsday visions and dystopias—produces dream images that must be read as redemptive fantasies. That these depictions reproduce the wellknown and are themselves illusions are aspects dealt with by the artist in her series.

Jan Kage

(Quelle: Anina Brisolla, Jan Kage: „Prospect“, in: The Property Issue – Ground Control and the Commons, Aachen 2018, S. 8–13, hier S. 8)