The Flatten Project

It becomes a window to the dynamics and trajectory of a relationship between distant cultures, education and overall backgrounds.

- by Annika Eschmann and Daniel Castells

The Flatten Project (@flatten.project) is a public visual dialog in the frame of the Question me and Answer program from Improper Walls, between Annika Eschmann (1990) and Daniel Castells (1990), two artists, strangers to each other. 

In the Flatten Project, their juxtaposition of individual ideas and point of views result in complete images, charged with a strong personal content that develops into a much wider analysis. With a digital platform as one of their main destinations, the outcomes bring up topics such as art and social media, the white cube, aesthetics of the practice itself, as well as opening discussions over socio-political issues. And it becomes a window to the dynamics and trajectory of a relationship between distant cultures, education and overall backgrounds. Furthermore, it is influenced by the work of each of them and by the approach taken due to the current Corona situation.

The name behind this on-going project is a popular idiom that provides the work with a social context, links it with several connotations it carries and refers to the applied process used in the software to achieve the final images, which have become their complete state by layering back and forth visuals from different sources, in a collaborative ping-pong-like method where each artist gets to edit over what the other did lastly. 

That is how the idea came through. With a starting point of being two unknown individuals to one another, and with a few logistic constrictions, the concept of a long distance relationship and co-working forced by a status the world is living at the moment, brought up the questions: how  to be able to put up something together as one shared piece? How to compromise enough in order to maintain coherence and a level of relevance in its content?

So, the liberty to create individually and to respond to the other by the interpretation of the layers and alterations the other did, builds an unspoken synergy that ends up representing both artists whilst allowing the project to be open to further developments and modifications.