/ Horizon

The multimedia installation Horizon (2024), conceived by Franek Wardyński, is the result of a creative process that began in 2019 during the artist’s participation in the Land Arts of the American West program in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

Recording the landscape and terrain in and around North Texas as a conceptual starting point, the project explores the possibilities of combining story navigation, audio experience, and disciplined photography—all in a constant pan.

The work lives between cinema and art, documentary and fiction: it tells a story of America 30 million years ago, divided by the Western Interior Seaway, while looking at the climate crisis and an increasingly flooded America, reminding us all what is at stake.

Wardynski uses repetition inspired by French artist Pierre Huyghe's work Remake, which explores analysis generated by sequence. Instead of considering Horizon as a social commentary, Wardynski, similarly to Huyghe, suggests an anthropological reset: What can art do for the non-human environment in the big scheme of things? In dealing with what is next and what we consider safe.

For this work, Wardynski lived and worked in Lubbock, where he created the framework for the movie as a spinning, haunted horizon: a dark tale of human land use in the American West, a mental map of sorts.

The relationship between the slow movement and the fixed horizon creates an interior, a type of space in itself: a document with a parallel story of past, present, and future—a cold landscape analysis at times. The same is true for the sound, where we are invited to drift from horror to humour in the depths of feelings. The installation is a photographic record, raising questions about using land as a stage for an anthropological narrative.

In the three-channel installation, sound works and word-scape merge in and out across multiple screens in choreography, a perfect rhythm, sometimes unsettling but more often mesmerising and hypnotic, resulting in a subterranean meditation.

The narrative suggests that something is looming, connecting the past with the future, a notion that we should all be wary of. In Lubbock-local author Barry Lopez's namesake book, Horizon (2019), he talks about collecting a handful of mementoes from his travels, arranged to make intuitive sense, like scenes in a short story. This matrix, he suggests, has a deeper truth of life that always lies beyond his reach. Wardynski’s collection of flatlands does a similar thing, reminding us of land use in constant movement.

Horizon premiered at the Warsaw Architecture Pavilion Zodiak in January 2025 and was later presented at the Crea Open exhibition in Venice in April 2025.