Solastalgia

A visitor to the virtual world of Solastalgia moves like a ghost. VR technology enables a realistic feeling of flight, penetration through walls, hovering over the streets. The buildings and the space look familiar, but the visitor experiences them quite differently than in the real world. A sense of a disembodied presence, evoking questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship one has with the outside world.

Agnieszka Tarasiuk

The Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia in 2003 to describe the emotions caused by industrial landscape changes. Natural ecosystems are degrading at pace we are unable to emotionally integrate.
Szymon Rogiński shows the catastrophic aspect of everyday life in the interior of global capitalism, whose economic principle is constant growth. Ordinary life – houses, shops, workplaces and means of transport cause a landscape calamity comparable to areas of environmental disasters.
The exhibition consists of three cycles of photography, virtual reality experience, and a sculpture created using the method of photogrammetry and 3D modeling. Various forms of expression are linked by the author’s specific emotional realism. The artist records the space of small and larger Polish towns both using a telephoto lens, which allows him to tell touching vernacular micro-stories, and a wide-angle drone camera. The view from above is not beautiful.
Seeing the amount of destruction, we have done to our landscape, it is difficult to feel sentimental over the naive aesthetics of provincial stores or sympathetic towards the tenacity of human efforts. Szymon Rogiński, together with a team, created a virtual reality environment based on the data recorded using photogrammetry in Warsaw and several other Polish cities. Consciously used technology allows us to see the true face of the reality in which we live.

Colofon:
Concept and directing: Szymon Rogiński 
Collaboration: Agnieszka Tarasiuk 
Photogrammetry: Szymon Rogiński 
Theme Music: Macio Moretii  
Soundscape & Implementation: Gustaw Gliwinski
Digital Artists – Pavlo Mazur, Martix Navrot, Jagoda Wójtowicz 
VR Application Production – Marcin Marczyk 
Programming – Łukasz Nizik 
Graphic design – Michał Babski

Producer: National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning
Coordination: Kacper Kępiński, Klementyna Świeżewska, Joanna Waśko

Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland

Part of the preparation work was realised within the framework of the scholarship of the City of Warsaw in 2018.