two, 2019 - 2022
There is a thread connecting some of the concepts in this project to my past project ‘mishappenings’. Two, is an ongoing series that was initially in response to a collection of email exchanges between Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark titled, I’m very into you: correspondence 1995-1996. It is intimate writing between two authors and their desire for a shared connection. There is one passage from Wark to Acker that many of my current pieces revolve around, “What does Baudelaire say: the lovers come face to face, eye to eye, and in an instant one blinks, and in that instant it is decided: who shall be loves victim, and who love’s executioner”.
When reflecting on this text, I am not only seeking for these images to comment on the connection between people or the absence of one, in the way I intervene with the photographs, using colour, collage, and more recently inserting videos into the images, but I am also reflecting on the performative act of photographing and the process of making images. For example, when reading Baudelaire’s text, ‘an instant one blinks’ or ‘loves victim’ or ‘love’s executioner’, it can also be connected to the moment of capture, and to be looking and to be seen, and the ability to extend the timeline of an image captured, beyond the moment in which the ‘event’ happened. The interventions I make to the photographs could be seen as ways of reliving and retelling the jilted lover’s memory. The adornments and embellishments added to the scenes in the photographs, could perhaps also be a love story that isn’t only between people, but the experience with a place.