Nine lightboxes using Züber & Cie’s panoramic wallpaper ‘Eldorado’. This depicts scenes from Africa to Asia, from Europe to the Americas.

Onto and into this landscape, sit a collection of phrases and words. Some taken from existing large text works by Coley, some from literature around the myth of Eldorado, and some simply words that create a new meaning when located in this fictional world.

The works are presented in the gallery on top of another panorama, this time made using AI. The black and white landscape pasted to the wall has been generated using the information and content from the original printed wallpaper. AI software has ‘generated’ a new landscape taken from the original woodblock design, a re-fashioning of the images made by the French artisans in 1848. This render surrounds the viewer, and acts as a new world in which the lighboxes in turn punctuate.

The installation speaks of the world in our imagination - words already in the world, places to visiting in our thoughts, and the essential relationship between languages and landscape.

Züber & Cie, Rixhein, France

Züber & Cie’s panoramic wallpaper ‘Eldorado’ is still hand-printed today using 1554 original antique woodblocks. The scene was first produced in 1848 by French artisans. It stretches to 13m in length over 24 sections, and uses over 200 colours. These woodblocks are classified as Historical Monuments by the Ministry of Culture and are part of France’s national cultural heritage. The Zuber factory is the last in the world to produce panoramic sceneries using wood printing.

Eldorado

Eldorado is a mythical city of gold supposedly located somewhere in South America. The king of this city was said to be so rich that he would cover himself from head to foot in gold dust – either daily or on certain ceremonial occasions – before diving into a sacred lake to wash it off. The legend was first recorded in the 16th century by Spanish colonists in America; they referred to the king as El Dorado, ‘the golden one’, a name which eventually came to be applied to the city itself.

El Dorado represents the kind of world imagined by utopian philosophers. El Dorado might be the “best of all possible worlds” but at the same time it is made to seem unbelievable.