Geert Goiris — Writing to myself — Art : Concept Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Ends in 28 days: November 7, 2024 → January 18, 2025

These images surfaced while browsing through my archive somewhat absentmindedly. I picked them up intuitively and stuck them on my studio wall in everchanging order. Gradually a sequence with an inner correspondence emerged. Like any communication, it relies on a degree of archiving: looking, sorting and classifying, temporizing, formulating a response. I wish I could understand the meaning of the operations I endlessly performed. On the outskirts of the intentional, everything can become a statement, a language.

Where does the desire to collect, store and retrieve stem from? I cling to traces of my existence and have outsourced part of my memory to transitional objects.

Photographs, of course, but also maps of places I explored, drawers full of prints that will never be shown, plans unlikely to be implemented. My filing cabinet became so cluttered that I had to get rid of everything except a few notes and images that seemed to say something. If it didn’t sound so pretentious, I would call it a curated visual autobiography. Or is it rather a form of autofiction? Writing to myself speculates on how technology expands our communication patterns. Can camera-images disclose inner dialogues? (or are they monologues?) I still insist on shooting on analogue film because something remains unseen and anticipated. Instant photography is different: when the picture appears on a screen immediately after its capture, it is efficient and comforting. In contrast, a latent image exposed on film remains obscure. From its very beginning this type of image is a potentiality, waiting to be activated by a viewer.

As Baudrillard noticed: The essence of the photograph is not to illustrate an object or event, but to make itself into an event. Photography’s mechanisms extend the working of the apparatus. Before and after the camera is used, the medium continues to frame and focus through successive steps of research and organization, developing and contact printing, selecting negatives, diving into the detailed texture of an image through high resolution scanning or enlargement, finding an adequate surface by making test prints on different types of paper, reinforcing the expressiveness of an image by placing it in a sequence or context. Passing these consecutive filters, most images fade away into a murky background. The repetitive tasks of archiving are mind-numbing, my attention floats and only few images stand out. What makes the ones that remain so special? Do they emanate some kind of deep glow? What if the perceived dichotomy between surface and depth is an illusion, a misconception stemming from lazy thinking? We seem to equal surface with shallowness, deep things don’t shine. Sleekness is understood to conceal truth.

Suppose we got it all wrong? Maybe a glimmering surface is telling us something.

What if that radiant glare only happens when different layers of reality meet? When the multiverse folds and worlds touch each other.

Physics teaches us that reflection is a material property: some wavelengths are absorbed, others reflected. The material answers the light it receives. In older beliefs, objects were understood as visible because they had the power to project themselves unto our eyes. Not in the way of light rays reflected by a substance, but as a self-aware object reaching out to its beholder.

By giving form to unseen things photography might activate our imagination. If we want it to, the medium can fabulate. It seems we need to live in stories and thoughts rather than in the tangible world sometimes.

In the video film screened here for the first time, one sentence is repeated over and over: ‘All the scripts are here, all the paths you could have taken’. This mantra swells into a chorus of a single voice multiplied by overdubbing, evoking a polyphony that could never occur without technological intervention. All the scripts is a storyless video, a rhythmic succession of images linking together the archive and the idea of the multiverse. An endless number of parallel realms containing similar but slightly different versions of everything.

Geert Goiris, 2024