Negative Landscape

ORDER

Sinkholes are geological accidents that indicate the emptying of underground aquifers, places where the earth collapses and caves in, yielding to gravity and creating cavities of varying depths. Although they can occur for natural reasons, they are mostly the result of human activity: changes in river courses, intensive exploitation of water resources, mining activity and abandonment of mining sites. Over the last few decades, their number has increased considerably on the Iranian plateau.

This book presents Kimia Kamvari’s exploration of these cavities between 2019 and 2021. It showcases the core of the work, consisting of a careful and methodical series of photographs, accompanied by cartographic sheets and texts that help to understand the artist’s perspective on the phenomenon and stimulate the reader’s own.

Each sinkhole reveals a world at once tangible and enigmatic, opening a space where scientific observation meets imaginative speculation. The earth falls to earth and an empty space is filled with abstraction. This book invites us to direct our gaze towards a sphere that is fundamental to us: the surface, the Earth.