Collecting Places

COLLECTING PLACES from the collection of the Improbable Museum

COLLECTING

PLACES

from the collection of the Improbable Museum

A Project of Joao Paulo Serafim

COLLECTING PLACES

Like an other began these images: photographic postcards. Multiple anonymous with precise sender and addressees, turned into personal confessions. Lost, when they abandoned the web of relations that once personalized them. Appropriated objects, since the beginning, those postcards: appropriated, going from an ˜I˜ to a ˜you˜ who becomes an ˜I˜, its last appropriator. Their last assigner of sense.

Until reappropriation takes place. Remaking, once again, the sense, redefining it’s own visuality: what is or isn’t visible – or more or less so. Establishing previously non-existent relations, new hierarchies.

Creating sense, not as a whole, but rather by its fragments – opposing the initial image wholeness.

A beach scene becomes a ball game – or a scene of seduction, or one of voyeurism…Choosing, making it subjective, reordering – and insinuating a narrative. Always opened to the perusal of a new observer. Changing places: Who observes what? Photographing the photographer, observing the observer – in a recomposed image to be observed anew. Publicly. To peep is fragment and nostalgia.

Through the hole in the wall, which whatever copy of Susannah and the Elders hides, the keyhole, the window of the apartment tower, with the binoculars…what one sees is, more than ever, a fragment of space and time. The present time in which one peeps, is stuck to the past time which led to peeping, overlap both and hope for a future – how, why and for how long will that future last depends on the observer. Who is this postcard shredder, this observer’s observer, and this prowler? A scientist, a policeman, a psychopath, a terrorist? A baudelerian ˜flaneur˜? Distant curiosity, authority or erotism?

By individualizing, choosing, randomly or not (clearly not, in several occasions), does he desire?

What? Is there love in that desire? Is there sex? Is there tenderness, violence, indifference?

He individualizes by cutting, by discontinuing and by delimitating – reframing.

Reframing is one of photography’s tools (and of vision) theme of these photographs. The framework is the space delimitating an interior, but also the surrounding, the context (social, economic, institutional, sexual…) that also makes up the object, in this case, photographic.

Kitsch postcards, kitsch song from the 70’s that gives a title to these images which select a plurality of ambiguous and unstable ˜them˜, that however turn the shredding into a gesture that points out physically at the image. This gesture establishes itself within the fiction of a vision status, as if the image’s shredding was the result of lighting or of focusing. Self-referential. In the centre of photographic tradition – or of its fiction: light, distance, and the lens. The light that prints nature into the photographic media, without mediator. Essential fiction to the photographic truth. Clean and delicate cut made of light. Perverse and false it does not light but darkens, to underscore what is chosen. Dissimulation that unveils.

Simulations: The postcard that simulates fine art photography, fine art photography that simulates a postcard, the new that simulates the old, the present that simulates the past. Presentified past. Relation with time: memory – personal, filling objects that have return to anonymity. But has simulacrum a past? Wouldn’t the past, firstly, be a relation with the origins? The simulacrum has no original. If it does not have a past, therefore, it is in so far as it does not establish any genealogy, or hierarchy, with it. We don’t know these people, but we are familiar with these images. As construction, as type, as format, as genre. Genres. When I take an anonymous crowd and from it I choose, cut out, individuals, is that individual or collective, private or public? Portrait or landscape? A changing landscape in its substance and in its significance, in its experiences: The beach of the beach goers, and of holydays and of tourism. One peeps, always, between private and public. And between terms play these images: Between distance and proximity, documentary and fiction, kitsch and its redemption, moment and narration

Design: Joao Paulo Serafim Text: José António Leitão Translation: Pedro Baptista Paper: Munken Lynx 100gr Font: Optima LT www.miiac.com 2014©