12/09/2026
Parallel Vienna / Baumgartner Höhe 1 Venna // Booth 7/006
Anja Tončic, Cartographic Commodifying of the Abyss, 100 x 130cm, drawing on paper, wooden box frame, 2026
The composition is dominated by a vast ash-toned crater around the Mount Etna, an active stratovolcano on the eastern coast of Sicily, Italy.
It feels ancient, silent and entirely indifferent to human presence, still, rendered in vivid, saturated layers of Polychromos colored pencils a vivid scar presenting a LIDAR scan (thermal
heat map) is a mineral density survey. It represents the urge to translate a dying, shifting landscape into readable and quantifiable metrics.
The transition from organic, textured graphite to neon pigment captures the exact friction between the physical earth and the artificial systems built to exploit it.
It is the visual equivalent of a collapsing geofinancial atlas.
Within the thermal band, there are figures registered only as glowing heat signatures,
completely stripped of their humanity and reduced to biological anomalies in a spreadsheet.
The clinical, institutional white box without a protective glass attempts to contain, archive and sterilize this massive unruly abyss, but the raw unshielded materiality of the drawing refuses to be entirely neutralized.
