ACTS OF DISAPPEARANCE – WAYS OF DISAPPEARING IN PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANDSCAPE

“The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Acts of disappearance brings together a group of artists who have in common the use of photography as a tool of action – beyond the medium in which they operate and the object on which they rely – to talk about transience and impermanence of landscape. An exhibition with a series of installation works where images are a celebration and a reflection about the “being forever on the alert”. The works of Morten Barker, Nuno Barroso, Emanuel Cederqvist, Ida Nissen, Joshua Phillips and Thomas Wynne are about redefining the gaze on reality, beyond the subjectivity of the human eye, underlining the impermanent, transitory and ephemeral nature of landscape in its extendable notion.

1.“If I were to be asked what we are, I should answer: “We are the door to everything that can be, we are the expectation that no material response can satisfy, no trick with words deceive. We seek the heights. Each one of us can ignore this search if he has a mind to, but mankind as a whole aspires to these heights; they are the only definition of his nature, his only justification and significance” – Georges Bataille, Eroticism

By exchanging “words” for “photos” in this quote from Bataille, we are free to say that there is no image that can satisfy, elude or take us away from the normative, everyday cataclysm within which our existence seems to stagnate. In this exhibition we are not so much interested in exposing photos, but more in reflecting on what is impossible to be exhibited. The dark room nowadays is a screen of overlapping windows and seemingly infinite light, where information does not move us but rather invades and steals our sleep hours.

2.Blaise Cendrars, in an interview, spoke about the necessary conditions for a writer to operate:

“A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be. Like Saint Jerome, a writer should work in his cell. Turn the back. Writing is a view of the spirit. “The world is my representation.” Humanity lives in its fiction. This is why a conqueror always wants to transform the face of the world into his image. Today, I even veil the mirrors.”

Blaise Cendrars, The Art of Fiction No. 38, Paris Review, Issue 37, Spring 1966

The landscape for the photographer here functions as the cell of Saint Jerome, but more like an infinite cell, where we are constituent parts of the world and, conscious of this, perceive the fiction that humanity artificially imposes on the world. The production and reproduction of images are only the articulation of a discourse, permeable and controlled by an “order of discourse”, contextually based on an idea of ​​historical “man” that will tend to become obsolete and to disappear, as Foucault told us.

The photographer, as the writer, seeks the conditions to be able to articulate a discourse with his own sensitivity, a continuous attempt to go beyond the narrative of our great and continuous spectacle.

3. The photographer does not need to photograph. We know that collage, assemblage, the use of archive images and their reconfiguration are not new techniques in photography and that digital graphic editing tools are extensive and booming. Another question is its use, the discourse that can be created and how poetic cuts with the tradition and the perception of reality can happen, as it happens, for example, with Chris Marker in film and with Adam Curtis’s documentaries.

In this exhibition, one of the cases that elaborate a cut and an original speech in photography is the work of Morten Barker. He uses photographs of NASA’s Apollo Program in the Moon and of a specific horizon from Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour (which also gives the title to his piece) to produce a single photo (with 1.645 x 55 cm or 129600×4331 pixels equal to one pixel pr. frame of the movie) bringing together in one landscape – the ghost of what disappeared and what is becoming. We encounter it as a long sequence shot in a film or as if each frame is happening simultaneously, reminiscent of an Aleph effect (in the homonymous short story by Jorge Luis Borges).

4. The photographer goes to the place that was photographed. In Emanuel Cederqvist’s case, he travels around the same places and lives the same conditions as Axel Hamberg, in the mountains where he photographed the landscape and disappeared (the landscape or the man?). His material is a continuation; it is a humble and genial dialogue that takes the shape, in this case, of photography, but with the poetic outlines of a great expedition or a walking art piece. Here a reflection on time, death and the transformation of things, which makes us look at the landscape, the existence in an uninterrupted way.

5. The photographer heads towards South looking for images. In the case of Nuno Barroso, he drew a line in the direction of Morocco, which appeared parallel to New Mexico (strangely enough, on the American side, on July 16, 1945, the first nuclear test — code name Trinity — was made).

Here, travelling, searching for clues or more articulated signals in the landscape, works as a form of understanding impermanence and transience in nature and humankind or as a certain type of ecology. Present there is also a quality of a constant non projection onto the object, even the contrary of it: as if the landscapes reveal the spirit and the selfless, inquisitive nature of the photographer.

6. The photographer photographs what he does not see. In Thomas Wynne’s case, he works on what disappears behind the photograph, which is also a place of seduction, photography materialized as a wall, where another landscape opens, or where a narrative is built without any one ever having access to it. This work is also about the possibility of photography as an object of hindrance, of camouflage, of illusion, assumed by the subject, now facing the impossibility of walking behind the object (because on doing that he/she would be altering the narrative on the other side, and be obscured by the shadow in the picture’s back). In his work, on the Duality of being here or there, he explores the nowhere and the very liminal ground condition where the photographer stands.

7. The photographer starts with a detail of a found photograph. Joshua Phillips zooms in a wallpaper motif that he found in a design magazine, to fuel and start a series of works about how the natural patterns are spread across objects in the everyday life, through cross-over imagery, and how a certain appropriation of nature operates in some apparatuses.  Wallpapers, carpets, china plates are in fact micro forests, oriental and Victorian gardens ready to be reassembled, reused, not as ornaments, but as fields for contrast and reflection on disappearance, through accumulation, collage, arrangement and reallocation.

8. The photographer waits for the disappearance of the image. Disappearance through visual and sensorial abstraction is the powerful work that Ida Nissen presents with depth. Closing the circle, in this collective experience, she proposes a return of photography that is an advance: photography as sculpture, photography as matter and light, its links to a certain magic and ghostly features (that in the beginning of the medium were more present), and to geology and chemistry as well. In a world where all processes are accelerated and mediated by vertical screens where the order of discourse is mastered, she places us to look at something that disappears, like us, during the exhibition.

The role of the photographer goes beyond commenting the fleeting nature of things and documentation of the world. The photographer must direct our gaze as observation is action and an integral part of ecology.

Bruno Humberto

Artists

MORTEN BARKER

NUNO BARROSO

EMANUEL CEDERQVIST

IDA NISSEN

JOSHUA PHILLIPS

THOMAS WYNNE

Curator

BRUNO HUMBERTO