SCIENCE FICTION

The older I get, the more I am drawn to the landscape where I grew up: Bushes, shrubs, here and there a grove of small pines and birches. There are still a few around Vienna; they are reminiscent of the savannah, and I had always believed that they were remnants of that mythical landscape of mankind's origins. But soon I found asphalt under the grass, pavement under a thin layer of moss, and the rocks, so picturesquely scattered picturesquely across the landscape were made of reinforced concrete. So these places have been inhabited before, even industrialized or civilized, and I wasn't looking into the distant past, but into the future: a gentle and romantic apocalypse. This is what the whole country will look like, the villages and towns, the fields and streets, when we humans will no longer be there. We won't see that, so I'm already photographing it now.  Michael Nagl