Anton Ginzburg: Walking the Sea

In Walking the Sea, Anton Ginzburg (* 1974 in St. Pe­tersburg) charts a twenty-six-thousand-square-mile area between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan known as the Aral Sea, an environmental ruin of the Soviet era. Drawing on the tradition of American Land Art from the late sixties and early seventies, Ginzburg ap­proaches the waterless sea as a ready-made earth­work in order to make visible a territory, history, and a potential imaginary space that remain largely inac­cessible. The resulting film, photographs, and sculp­tures refer to regional histories and cultural myths, ranging from the figure of the plein-air painter as a traveling dervish to the idea of the landscape as shaped like an Aeolian harp, and the belief in a sub­terranean “inner sea” into which the Aral Sea has dis­appeared. The book pays homage to a rich history of artists who have approached the world from the per­spective of a wanderer and who have mapped and re­shaped both landscapes and urban environments through the act of walking.