Assignment 4 from jazele rabbani on Vimeo.
Natural Nature
In this piece of video art, I am exploring the notion that our ideas about nature are subjective. Our experience of the “natural world” is different for everyone depending on what a particular person sees every day, but for many—like myself—the “natural” world we see isn’t natural at all: it’s the suburbs and highly constructed.
I grew up in Sylvania, Ohio which is a suburb of Toledo, a relatively small city. When I was a child, I lived in neighborhood full of old streets and houses. Then all of a sudden, the neighborhood started to expand and take over the woods we were connected to. Without even realizing it until now, my childhood consisted of walking through a forest and seeing it get taken down tree by tree to see the “new neighborhood everyone was so excited for” get built. To this day, nature is still being torn away and destroyed.
I have always enjoyed taking walks around my neighborhood and parks; recently while walking in my neighborhood I started thinking about the nature and trees that are still here and the ones that once were. I appreciate all the natural elements around me, and I love focusing in and actually paying attention to what I see. For this reason, my body of work highlights the commonplace nature that people ignore. In my new video, trees reclaim their land and show themselves through the houses that once took over.
