Maja Marx

As Far As the Eye Can Touch:: South African Landscape Inscription and the Haptic Maja Marx

The phenomenon of chalking, using white chalked stones to write onto the land is a familiar sight in the South African landscape. The process of inscription as an act of naming and claiming is one developed primarily from a colonial approach to the landscape as supposedly empty or semiotically mute. In As Far As The Eye Can Touch artist Maja Marx draws together different approaches to the reading of landscape as text arguing for an embodied reader and a dynamic engagement between the phenomenological body and topographic space. Marx argues that the inscribed landscape implies a moving viewer and that traveling is an act of reading as the passage across the landscape reveals an incessant text. Topographic space merges into embodied space, the optic slides into the haptic, and the texts on the landscape become an embodied literalisation of cartographic inscription. In Marx's artistic practice the writing of text onto land is a performance: the body takes the place of the hand in writing. In a rare blend of the fields of Human Geography, Art and Spatial design, Marx's book finds a profound link between looking and touching, drawing on the theories of Serres, Lefebvre & Merleau-Ponty.