“That’s like the living ghost of an immense country trapped in a permanent unmaking…”
Antonio Luis Ramos Membrive
Media:
Painting, sculpture, video art, sound installation
Materials:
Discarded plywood; oil and acrylic on wood; found refrigerator; ambient sound loops; digital video
All objects were created from waste generated during the production of wooden world maps.
When a laser cuts the contours of a continent, island, or country, scraps of plywood are always left behind. These pieces are typically thrown away—sent to recycling or burned as kindling. They are what remains outside the map. Or perhaps they are those mysterious, never-before-seen territories? I wanted to call them Outlands. S.S.
Outlands is a multimedia project combining painting, sculptural installation, video, and sound to explore what is left out—materially and metaphysically; politically, geographically, and emotionally.
At the core of the project are discarded plywood cutouts: the industrial byproduct of manufacturing decorative wooden world maps. As continents, islands, and nations are laser-cut from uniform sheets, the leftover fragments—ambiguous silhouettes and negative spaces—are treated as waste. Yet these cutoffs, seemingly meaningless, become a powerful visual metaphor. They suggest unclaimed land, lost territories, forgotten nations, and spaces that never made it onto the map. They are Outlands: territories of absence, erased from the official narrative.
The project began over three years ago, when I encountered industrial bins filled with these plywood remnants. What first appeared as refuse soon revealed itself as a poetic counterform—abstract borders of countries, oceans, and unnamed voids. By reclaiming and recontextualizing these fragments through painting and installation, I reanimate their silent history and give form to spaces suspended between erasure and potential.
Outlands merges tactile and conceptual media:
Paintings depict imaginary geographies inspired by the shapes of the scrap forms. Atmospheric and muted, they resemble fog-bound territories, echoing absence and longing.
Assemblages and objects are built directly from plywood leftovers, their abstract contours emphasized and presented as sculptural elements.
A sound sculpture—installed inside a found refrigerator (a symbol of frozen space and forgotten memory)—emits layered ambient textures: loops of noise and faint archival echoes, referencing land, silence, and decay.
Video further animates the Outlands through slow transitions of form, glitching borders, and drifting contours—reinforcing the idea of unstable cartographies.
Ultimately, Outlands asks how value, memory, and visibility are assigned to territory—both physical and psychological. It confronts what happens when places are excluded from representation. What do we forget when we draw maps? What gets cut out?
Electronic catalogue:
The project was created within the framework of the Scholarship for Cultural Creators of the Marshal of Pomeranian for 2022.
Supported by: Pracownia Twórcza Avokado and Savchenko Gallery.
Exhibition in Gallery “Dzyga” 08.10.2022 – 28.10.2022
works from project
Sound sculpture “Donbas-time»
It consists of a refrigerator a specific design of the 70s of the “Donbas” brand. Outside, the refrigerator is lined with imaginary tourist magnets – symbolic pieces of wooden maps. From the middle, the sounds of the clock, which accelerates its rhythm, are heard permanently, until the alarming sound of the buzzer, which sends the viewer to the association of the signal of a stopped heart from a cardio logical machine. Immediately after the clock, the loud sound of a human heartbeat is turned on, which also turns into a stop-buzzer as it speeds up. The refrigerator can be opened, and when the door is opened, the sound becomes much louder and more disturbing. Inside the refrigerator, there is a monitor that constantly broadcasts video with continuous transformation of map parts. This object has a bunch of associative images, ranging from a mine with a clock mechanism to a kind of time machine, which keeps in its interior unceasing civilizational processes, which do not spoil due to what is in the refrigerator.
Outlands in Savchenko Gallery, Gdansk, Poland.
process of creation of Project:
