Estelle Onema in conversation with GESTE artists: Ania Freindorf, Alexane Morin, The Mariwai Project, Achim Mohné (dark-taxa project)
In this new iteration of GESTE, a distinctive body of photo-based works given for contemplation is informed by an emphasized gaze on landscape and territory, cultural dynamics, as well as structures of power.
Our conversation starts with acknowledging the past as, what stands before us, the ground where we may build a common future. Therefore, we understand how in certain idioms past translate the same as future; yesterday stands for tomorrow (as for lingala word lobi). With this reciprocity our present time will be the next generation's past and future, it means responsibilities inexorably lay on us.
Photography is not only about drawing with light, but also about sculpting and morphing time. It offers distinctive ways to analyze, apprehend and navigate our current world.
Trained as a sculptor, Alexane Morin envisions photography in material terms allowing experimentation with all forms of traces and imprints. Her series of prints on a wax support embraces real time although there is a sense of permanent and stiff, as the material is trapped between two sheets of glass, like a standing stele, or introduced like a scientific object in an entomology display box. The ductile translucent substance opposes its fluidity and malleability to the rigorous architectural grid of the transferred image. The wax is also a symbol of longevity if not of immortality: the artist enjoys its capacity to preserve or be preserved forever. The photography is part of a fieldwork consisting in documenting what is about to vanish and in archiving (the activity of the artist’s father) in an artistic gesture. The action takes place in an interval of time before being presented in an interstice.
We find a similar emergency in alpinist Anya Freindorf's photographic enterprise, although in her case it takes the form of a worldwide expedition fully engaging her mental and physical resources, as well as requiring substantial financial and communication means. Her object, the frozen water of the glaciers is a metaphor of the act of photographing – which is, freezing a moment. She introduces to us these nurturing giants and immemorial beings as Naked Glaciers currently living in suspension, in a critical moment: their life expectancy is, for at least a third of them, the horizon of the end of this century. The associated sound installation, a mix of cry and Swan Song (before its ineluctable death the swan offers its most beautiful and overwhelming song ever), amplifies the pristine immersive colour photography which bears an anatomic form, not devoid of a fleshy aspect.
Taking complete distance from the subject and being detached from the camera Achim Mohné’s proposal is part of a post photographic era with a concern for taking height and restoring our capacity to critically analyze our world. The first step of this exploration consists in targeting sensible sites characteristic of our industrial age where the public is not wanted, and thus, to tackle power structures while appropriating surveillance technology. The time-consuming process employed by Mohné and his team consists in accumulating multiple screenshots of a determined location viewed from all sides, like in a medical imagery research. The method totally relies on Google Earth App, an orbital tool the artist has continuously explored since its launch. The resulting immersive virtual video is then transposed in a tangible 3D model. Space and time fusion in a tailormade portable and carved piece which fits in our hands, annihilating the original distance and giving us back a form of power.
Manipulation of cultural artefacts in photography is at the core of Shiva Burgos’ practice which involves objects from the Kwoma people living in the remote Upper Sepik River of the island of Papua New Guinea, in Oceania. This is where the artist found herself rooted, both emotionally and intellectually, since nearly a decade. In a territory where exists a strict divide between male and female activities she, as an artist, was welcome in the Men’s society while adopted in the broader social clan. Her selection of displaced objects is employed in a series of twelve cyanotypes on 'Power, Protection and Currency' presented vertically. This journey into another ontology revolves our own systems of thoughts and values. Obviously, these artefacts have passed from hand to hand, some maybe from generation to generation, and were used in sacred rituals or in mundane activities as everyday life unfolded. They were then negotiated and acquired by the artist. In the resulting journal in intense blue, the aura of the objects is translated into a halo, the arrangement resulting in an intimate sanctuary.
Despite seemingly remote positionings, goals and contexts, one can weave threads above them, regardless of geographical frontiers and technological criteria. It results in the feeling of belonging to connected temporalities and geographies. All of these photo-based interventions and innovations give us a sense of the artistic gesture capacity to rearrange the entropy we are projected in (accelerated uncontrolled time, decline of our ecologies, imbalance in power, justice and economies) by disrupting discourses, shifting strategies and reconnecting us to core human values which can never exclude non-human entities.
by Estelle Onema
art historian (Ecole de Louvre) and independent curator specialising in emerging scenes .Paris, November 20th (GESTE talk November 14th) 2021.
