DEBRISPHERE -
LANDSCAPE AS EXTENSION OF THE MILITARY IMAGINATION

Artists: Anca Benera &
Arnold Estefan
Published by PUNCH
2018
144 pages
13,5 x 20 cm
English
Softcover
ISBN 9786069430033

Price: €20


Texts by: Noit Banai, Andrew Chubb, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Hito Steyerl, Raluca Voinea, Eyal Weizman.

Debrisphere is a yet-unnamed stratum of the Earth crust, a supra-stratum of the Lithosphere. It contains the worldwide man-made landscapes: the artificial mountains of Germany, the “blooming deserts” of Israel, the military coral reefs of China and the United States, and other similar constructions around the world resulted from, or still serving, conflict and war.

The artist book by Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan is published as an extension to their eponymous installation, presented for the first time in the frame of "Natural Histories. Traces of the Political" exhibition at MUMOK Vienna in 2017.

Alongside the artists' case studies, which include Ariel Sharon Park, Teuflesberg, Diego Garcia, Johnston Atoll and the Spartly Islands, the publication includes four republished texts by Andrew Chubb, Hito Steyerl and Eyal Weizman, which informed the artists' research process, and also newly commissioned texts by Noit Banai, Maja & Reuben Fowkes and Raluca Voinea.

"Territories shaped by conflict and war, new geographical configurations that need to justify state and military expansions, artificially created natures concealing destruction and trauma, these are the bones and stones of the Debrisphere, the stratum above the Lithosphere that artists Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan have sampled and analysed.
Benera and Estefán play with the fine line where fiction and reality blur. It is a line similar to that of countries’ borders built as impenetrable walls and fences, or that between the desert and the forest, or the invisible maritime line separating the international from the colonising. This line is also the boundary where the Debrisphere occurs."
(Raluca Voinea)