This is an exorcism.
The twitter thread above contains pictures of decomposted hauntings (the last post I made on here, on photographic hauntings go further is depth on this idea of being haunted by photographs) – I had already gotten rid of the worst contenders a while back, by commiting them to flames.
But upon spending last week moving apartments, I unearthed a box with many old photographs I had forgotten about. They were all images I did not want to see, and keeping them in a box felt like it would just contaminate my new home with old darkness.
Therefore I decided to get rid of them, but how? I considered just putting them into the trash. Now, it could be said they are thrown into furnaces and are turned into dust, which is probably as close you will get to truly getting rid of something. However, I have tried burning film before in exorcistic purposes –
While it felt cathartic, it was a way of rejecting the old in favor of nothingness, turning it into dust. (The material of the end of all things!) It felt like a way of rejecting the outside world in an attempt to find pure reason, autonomy from what conditions me. To be liberated from our histories by destroying the present. It is, if anything, an instantiation of a death drive.
No, that was not an alternative this time. What I want is not an destruction into emptiness, what I want is to tear through and reach outside of my histories. To use them as matter in the construction of something new, something truly different. I refuse to either reject the past, or worship it.
If, as I wrote in my last post, developing film for me is a way of calling upon temporal demons to aid me it constructing pasts – in this I instead call upon demons of fragmentation – dissolution – to turn them into matter only. The shape of hauntings, undone. Made into mulch, captured light unleashed, becoming flows of matter again. Did you know that film are made out of gelatin; dead animals? A returning, then, away from static function into material becoming (with the help of life contained in earth). The image becomes one with multiple processes, transforming and clawing outwards – two-dimensionality becomes four, as it becomes another. Fragmentation. Entropy sings, and memories are dissolved and reused for the present movement, over the constant shifting horizon. The true state of all things is a waterfall.
Of course, the same holds for a fire burning negatives into dust. Nothing is nothing, the all is life. That emptiness was an illusion, but a dangerous one.
To write further on the theme of photography, and also expanding on what I wrote in my post on Traumatology – I think there are atleast three components of this becoming, in the order of:
1) The Event->2) Creativity/Calcification->3) Dissolution->1) The Event-> …
1) is what forces us inwards, into recreating ourselves, forcing us to move – or if we are unlucky – into rigidity, stagnation and nothingness. It is any event that tears through us, any time the world forcefully makes its presence known in total disregarh of our lives and small routines.
2) is what we must engage in to survive The Event, it is making chaos into something, it is cutting off The Events’ umbilical cord to the Outside. It is necessary to be a being; a somewhat self-contained process in any way each of us could be said to be one, apart from either geological movements, or superstructural ones.
3) is what occurs after Creativity/Calcification. It is when the clear cut barriers of their result start to wear down, dissolve into their surroundings. It is openness, reopening to the event, to movements outside of yourself. Letting yourself become a potential vector of becomings not yours.
Getting stuck in just one of these steps leads to death, romanticizing, ignorance, stagnation. Refusing any of them, the same.
The above photographic project is an attempt to engage in the third step. Letting memories become matter only. Opening up to movement and change.
It could be said the project is not truly cameraless since there used to to be images on the film used – the fact is that some of the strips buried were just accidently exposed film in some regard, but upon unearthing them I couldnt tell any difference from the once with prior images on or not. Therefore I do not think it really matters.
Verafied Theory 