Adelheid Frackiewicz: Landart, Mourning, and Translation

The authors position and contextualise Adelheid Frackiewicz's recent landart amid comparable works by contemporary artists, dealing with land loss, mourning, and migration. Paul Ricoeur's magnanimous view of translation, and Hans Belting's "anthropology" of inner images, aid to explore Frackiewicz's conceptual footings, and the possible effects of healing through her landart—related to the crossing of thresholds, funerary practices, displacement, and migration. The existential and "ontological" value of translation as envisaged by Ricoeur not only illuminates the artmaking processes of "carrying across" materials (as transferral or translation) but directs attention to the translations entailed in the unique enactment of practice-based research in this co-authored article, where theory, philosophy and practice—the hands-on knowledge-making of the artmaking process, and abstract thinking—are closely in constant conversation.