Nicolás Rupcich, TRL at ZiMMT, Leipzig

What remains of landscape when it ceases to be a place and becomes a dataset? As we entered the spaces of ZiMMT, we found ourselves wondering whether immersion, that much-lauded mantra of contemporary art, might in fact be a subtle form of dispossession: it envelops us, absorbs us, and quietly disables critical distance. But with Nicolás Rupcich, one does not sink into the landscape, one fractures alongside it. TRL does not ask us to enter, it exposes us.

The ZiMMT hall, with its precisely calibrated acoustics and enveloping geometry, becomes an active component of the work, not merely a container. The atmosphere is dark, but not opaque; sound vibrates through our skin and bones before it reaches the ears. There are no explanatory panels, no reassuring captions: the experience unfolds through disorientation, like walking through a canyon with no path. At the center, like a rupture in perceptual continuity, stands Black Canyon (2025), a pivotal work drawing on recordings from the Almaty region in Kazakhstan. Yet nothing here is documentary, these canyons are more than places, they are symptoms.

The installation plays with the notion of “noise” in both technical and philosophical terms. The images appear grainy, recomposed, as if first shattered by artificial intelligence and then reassembled without fully following the instructions. There is a constant tension between the desire to see and the impossibility of truly doing so. The same holds for the sound: it doesn’t accompany, it interrupts. It is a porous acoustic landscape, made of digital echoes, glitches, and crackles that seem to emerge from an algorithmic elsewhere.

Rupcich is not content with showing the transformation of landscape into image, he lays bare the very machinery of vision. His work critiques the forced transparency of contemporary technologies and the assumption that everything must be immediately visible, consumable, spectacular. In TRL, opacity becomes both a political and poetic strategy. What is hidden is not reality, but the very process of rendering it into “experience.”