It is a privilege to live and die, and yet I want to be eternal. I want to be remembered by the trees, by the leaves. I want to leave the mark of my body on the grass, even as I melt into the earth, seep underneath, and am covered over.
We make imprints, writing our names in the sand, and these traces of life remain around us. These traces are temporary—eventually, everything will vanish. Brian Eno says that he makes music for "imaginary landscapes," places that don’t exist but could. I compile different landscapes to make imaginary landscapes, places where we can escape the devastations of time.
We live and die among each other, and yet we are preserved in each other's memories. These memories are the traces and marks that last forever.
- Fran Kula, 2024
i set my face to the hillside is a body of work that was developed with an interest in memory and preserving time. Turning to the landscape as a place of escape, Kula photographs places familiar to them, compositing them together to create a fantasy landscape that them and the viewer can belong to. By photographing these landscapes, these places that always change. Kula is attempting to make them permanent. Through landscapes excluding subjects, occasionally including the artist's own shadow, they emphasize the disconnection they experience when entering an environment but within that, the subtle presence they are trying to imprint on the spaces they enter, an attempt to make this imaginary, real.
The photographs are accompanied by a short film, shot on 16mm.