photographs, resin, dust
22x16cm
In Alia Zapparovaʼs essay “The Poetics of Dust: Sebald and the Failure of the Document” I came across the following passage that caught my attention, determining the course of my artistic research: “Ferberʼs description of his own artistic method, which was an endless cycle of applying paint to the canvas and scraping it off. Ferber states that the dust resulting from his process that accumulated in his studio was the true product of his continuous endeavors and the most palpable proof of his failure.” Thinking about these lines, I found a highly personal parallel, related to my upbringing in a small, conservative town, where the occurrence of any kind of diversity or distinction from the local context, would be strongly contested or taken with hostility. In these circumstances I would begin my day with a kind of social masking, adjusting to the expectations of others by adapting and altering the nuances of my character. During eight years of conflicts and communication difficulties with my immediate social environment, I started to withdraw and to hide, accumulating scraps of “paint and dust” of all my previous phases. Moving to the new city, I decided to go back for these residues and to expose them in a highly tactile form: by encapsulating the traces I covered the photographs of “traumatic” locations in a permanent material, such as resin. In this way, the process of creating these three photographic objects represents a direct way of confronting (and overcoming) the past.