INFLUX – A Presentation

Photography INFLUX is a platform that proposes an x-ray of photographic practice in a problematic moment, marked by the establishment of the POST regime in multiple trajectories: Post-Photography, Post-Cinema, Post-Humanism, Post-Truth, Post-Internet. With the aim of crystallizing a community of artists who use photography, on a local scene lacking resources and funding continuity, discouraged by the lack of dedicated galleries and, at the same time, by the absence of a Museum of Photography, the platform aims to launch project selections annually, commissioning works and promoting artists, while also giving actors from different cultural centers the opportunity to connect.

2022, the debut year, began with the construction of a contact database and the commissioning of a first series of works by Romanian artists from various geographical areas (Bucharest, Cluj, Iași, but also Berlin, Brussels, London) and belonging to various “generations.” Together with Andrei Mateescu and Mihai Șovăială, we selected well-known artists, founders of photography and experimental film schools in Bucharest or Iași such as Iosif Király (1957) and Matei Bejenaru (1963), important actors on both the national and international scenes born in the 1970s (Nicu Ilfoveanu, Loredana Nemes), in the 1980s (Michele Bressan, Dani Ghercă, Andrei Nacu, Mihai Plătică), but also very young artists, recent graduates who can be included in the so-called Z generation.

Once the projects were gathered together, we realized that our selection, beyond a collection of geographies and periods, also succeeds in mapping important orientations in the field of contemporary photography, such as working with personal or found archives, institutional or vernacular, investigating the mechanisms of memory (personal but also social) and the intimate structure of space and time, redefining the landscape and the relationship between dwelling and being, returning to the object and the photographic installation, in accordance with certain Post-Internet trends. Last but not least, the selection aims to outline an ontology of the nonhuman (following Graham Harman and speculative realism), respectively the posthuman questioning of man’s relation to nature and technology (see the critique of anthropocentrism proposed by Rossi Braidotti, via Deleuze, and its corresponding umbrella concepts of becoming-animal, becoming-flower, becoming-machine, but also a whole series of comments that recontextualize Vertov’s cinematic eye or Paul Virilio’s critique of the mechanization of the gaze).

In agreement with Gilles Deleuze, who in his volumes on Cinema unraveled the metaphysical abilities of film, we believe that the selected photographic projects also demonstrate the existence of a so-called Thought-Photography. In this sense, an artist who works with photography is able to do philosophy, with the observation that instead of concepts they will use images and categories specific to the photographic act: by employing certain kinds of filters, colors, focal distances, framing, and reframing, selection operations, juxtapositions of the elements of an archive, overlaps and complicities of spatial perspectives or (temporal) moments. The discourse proposed by this Thought-Photography will deliver in our opinion answers more substantial than quantitative scientific ones about the intimate structure of space and time, about affect and the multiplicity and instability of the self.

This type of discourse can turn on the medium itself by investigating its inherent properties, its capacity for representation, expression, its possibilities of mimesis, manipulation, the kind of truth that can still (?) be unconcealed.

Mihai Plătică’s Chromatic Waves project launches a double question in this sense: on how digital photography still relates to the world and likewise on the regime by which color codes today govern the space of everyday affectivity. The approach is centered on photographs, which despite radical manipulations of perspective and color, retain a weak reference to the waves of the sea. The resulting series of images with neon waves, however, loses the ability to invoke a specific place or time, instead establishing a unique space of affectivity, based on color, independent of the physical world and its laws. Recalling how well-known artist Michel Snow’s structuralist film Wavelength (1967) investigated the affect of death and disappearance (through a 45-minute zoom which traveled through a New York studio stopping on a photograph of the sea hanging on the wall), Mihai Plătică’s project invokes the era of “media affects,” in which we have become accustomed to living with fear, limited by color codes: code orange for heat, a code-red storm, pandemic crisis, or, more recently, nuclear alert.

The same message is taken to its limits by Dani Ghercă, who, in his work My Library of Missed Opportunities, challenges both realism as an aesthetic orientation and the abilities of representation held by the photographic environment itself. At first glance a simple play with colored filters and Photoshop digital manipulations, the project actually initiates a performative process in which a number of 4×5 slides were directly exposed to various levels of colored light in a darkroom. In this sense, the artist hijacks photography to express his own state: characterized by distrust in the photographic eye’s ability to map the world, renunciation, transgression. Once again, we arrive at the construction of an affective space (via Deleuze’s any-space-whatever) of color which marks Dani Ghercă’s detachment from a fairly long creative stage dedicated to the realistic image, produced in large format and of spectacular aesthetic impact. In the end, an archive of affects is obtained, which correspond as much to the emotions experienced by the artist when leaving behind a heteronym, an artistic identity, as to a performative game of chance similar to that undertaken by Nam June Paik in Zen for Film, the empty film that with each new playback accumulates new scratches, new signs, new possible meanings.

In a similar register, Matei Bejenaru’s Diapozitiv traces the impact the retro technology of slides projected in a carousel sequence still has, a technology which brings photography closer to film, giving it duration, but also to sculpture, giving it materiality, body, aura. In this sense, the slide is shown as an object and the specific sound of the carousel builds a mechanical chorus, an affective atmosphere. At the same time, the photo accessories, such as the tripod or the black curtain, become main characters, mysterious, charged with aura, exposed and portrayed in nature. The discourse about the gaze becomes the metadiscourse of a technology-mediated gaze, facilitating important questions: Why is the natural landscape increasingly approached as a species of photography? How can we use film markers, the colored squares that control exposure, as visual signs? Matei Bejenaru’s interest in the depths of technology and new experimental possibilities, together with the impact of his large, spectacular frames, recontextualizes in the Post Cinema era the interpretation of film technology as divination machine (Robert Bresson) and true metaphysics (Gilles Deleuze, André Bazin). A whole wave of contemplative cinema is also referenced (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Abbas Kiarostami, etc.), which managed to rehabilitate the status of film by reconnecting it to its aesthetic value without compromising its socio-political significance.

On the same plane of cinematic contemplation evolve the landscapes coded in subtle shades of gray by Loredana Nemes and the photographic documentation process used by Nicu Ilfoveanu on the Romanian coast. The two projects are structured around the theme of landscape, natural or urban, and the relationship between being and dwelling (we are who we are according to our landscapes and buildings). Both question how photography can still deliver a phenomenological discourse, a capture of the image-fact (Bazin) and of things in themselves. Nicu Ilfoveanu’s project MAMAЯ. На пляже [translated as Mamaia. On the Beach] thus combines socialist summer-holiday architectural elements with film photographs of the sea, nearly deserted, which evoke the still, abstract landscapes of Hiroshi Sugimoto. The feeling of a lost past crystallizes in the context of a new affective photographic space, an empty, disconnected, almost abstract space. The deteriorated mosaics, the deserted hotels thus bring about a painful presence of the loss of summer holidays lived with candor on the former “pearls of the coast,” a loss of memories embedded in the walls of socialist hotels (in the meantime demolished or privatized according to the termopan, all inclusive model). The image of the sea likewise activates in the present millions of typified views, sent from the seaside to the corners of the world, as well as all the ways in which artists, from Sugimoto, Snow, or Richter to the participants of our current selection, set out to use truth as unconcealment, abstracting it or even canceling it, only to be able to retrieve it later.

Loredana Nemes also attempts such a recovery in her series of odd black-and-white photo landscapes of the sea and the trees on the coast, made over a period of three years spent on the German island of Rügen, a place of dwelling between waters, chosen by the artist as a refuge. We observe that the same return to nature, poetically revealed in the work’s concept (“we stand on that edge, with arms, branches and roots that embrace and feed each other, and nothing hurts anymore”), is analyzed by posthumanist theorists in terms such as becoming-landscape or becoming-flower. We also note that such a turn can only happen at the same time as we question the human capacity to represent nature as it is, for itself, nature as nature.

In this context, the choice of using a representation of the landscape based on subtle shades of gray can be read in Vilém Flusser’s terms who in Towards a Philosophy of Photography stated that between the green of the photograph and the green of the field there is a very distant connection, a whole string of codings, more complex than that which connects the gray of a plain photographed in black and white with the green of the same plain. It can therefore be argued that in photography color is more abstract than any gray. As we just saw above, the idea that colors hide a sequence of foreign codes in their background (digital color codes surpassing in complexity those of analog photography) infuses most of the criticisms of photographic representation (Ghercă, Plătică , Ilfoveanu, etc.).

The choice of grayscale-based technology is accompanied in Nemes’s work by the deliberate choice to use an unusual vertical, portrait-type format in rendering the landscape, which adds to the critique of anthropocentrism by transforming nature into a character. We find ourselves in front of an adequate example of how Thought-Photography builds discourse starting from categories and technical choices.

The sea once again populates the images – it is calm, shining cheerfully in the sun, abstract and empty of expression or heavy and covered by clouds. Beside it, the trunks of beech trees are portrayed as non-human persons: solitary or in groups, straight or winding, alive or bare of leaves, lost in fog or furrowed by shadows. On her island, next to the beeches and the expanse of the sea, the artist can in turn be herself, she can relinquish roles quietly regressing to that pure past, that Deleuzian Virtuality in which human, plant, and animal, all free to become, still had all potentialities open.

The same trajectory of a technical recovery of contemplation, questioning the photographic gaze and interrogating the notion of landscape, is operated by Michele Bressan in Familiar Views, a series of interior window images which photographically recontextualize Kiarostami’s last and most beautiful film, 24 Frames. It is an investigation into dwelling, connecting identity with our landscapes and buildings, with the help of a framing that overlaps multiple layers: exterior and interior, there and here, the landscape seen from the window as well as elements of the private intimate space in the proximity of the window. Familiar objects are thus inventoried: the window frame, the curtains, a small framed portrait of Arsenie Boca forgotten on the windowsill, and sometimes even a corner of furniture on which are three red saucepans, typically socialist, a white dish towel with a red stripe, a flower. The sequence of images invokes visual phenomenologies similar to the ones operated by New Romanian Realist cinema (small rooms, interspersed with beds and sofas, televisions with doilies on top, socialist kitchens populated by teapots with polka dots, etc.), but also the mechanism of a vernacular images archive.

This collection of window photographs thus brings back into discussion the theme of archive images in contemporary art, a central one in Andrei Nacu’s Sets, Subsets, Families project, and which, as we will see below, also structures the works of artists Elena-Andreea Teleagă, Iosif Király, Anca Target, or of the wundrkam group.

For Andrei Nacu, the familiar objects included by Michele Bressan or the directors of New Romanian Cinema in their visual phenomenologies become central elements that structure his own collection of vernacular photography, generating a taxonomy of life from the socialist period. In accordance with “Grounded Theory,” an approach specific to qualitative sociology which, starting from the study of collected data, selects significant samples and proposes theoretical interpretations based on them, Nacu chooses sets of everyday things and builds around them stories, alternatives of official history and memory. His histories thus reveal the red polka-dotted ball, the coarse plastic Donald Duck, the squirrel found in the park, and the Christmas tree to be fundamental categories that structured the horizon of a child in the socialist era, phenomenological markers according to which everyone measured personal happiness (“I have a ball,” “I’ve never petted a squirrel”) and related to the other (“dad said we can only decorate the tree on December 31st and that there is no Santa Claus”). Transposed photographically, the same categories mark the qualitative flow of duration time, closing loops and time crystals, activating memory, triggering at the sight of each photograph a new short circuit between the present and a string of past moments (“this ball looks like…”).

Elena-Andreea Teleagă builds another photographic installation placed under the sign of the archive, No Return to Comfort Zone, starting from a series of slides used for educational purposes in socialist times. In a hybrid room, combining a traditional classroom with a domestic space, the audience is thus invited to watch, seated on children’s chairs, the dialogue between two projections randomly joining images of bee and silkworm breeding, the growth and caring for trees, with images regulating the growth of young pioneers. A first slide reduces the child’s constitution to the following diagram: head, lower limbs, trunk, upper limbs. The joining of human individuals with insects and trees as well as the method in which young people are lined up, disciplined, dressed in uniform recalls the ancient but also current danger of the instrumentalization of the individual and the threat of biopolitics, of control and regulation manifested intrusively at the primary level of life itself. On a second level, the artist invokes the need to recalibrate the relationship between humans and nature.

An archive with problematic socio-political inflections also sits at the base of the soft hypostitions project, proposed by wundrkam, an independent and peripheral artistic research group. The young Alessandro Grigoriu and Ștefan Simion thus build possible histories and overwrite the official memory proposed by the media or even by cultural institutions intended to protect heritage or promote art and carry out art education. The story of the precious Basarabi-Murfatlar Cave Ensemble, left to die despite numerous reports sent to the responsible cultural institutions, thus mixes with the story of workers forced to choose the path of migration and various Post perspectives criticizing imperialist and anthropocentric humanism, which dominates (human) understanding of perception and experience possessed by the whole domain of the living, and even, at the limit, by inanimate agent objects, such as stones.

The theme of the archive intertwines with the theme of memory and duration time in the context of the projects proposed both by the senior (Iosif Kiraly) and by the junior (Anca Țintă, 2000) on the platform. In his work Echoes, Iosif Király investigates, following the already known model of Re-constructions, the connection between image and memory and the formation of time loops in which the present touches the past. Calling on complex collages that bring together different spatial perspectives and successive moments, Király uses Thought-Photography in revealing time as time, lived time that cannot be simplified nor spatialized, impossible to reduce to the circumference of a clock or the columns of a calendar. The triggers of these journeys through time (beloved people like the artist’s father, precious things like an old Volga car) connect with the theme of family albums, utilized by Andrei Nacu, observed from a new perspective by the young Anca Țintea. In the Index of Lost Matter project, she decomposes her father’s memories according to a rhizomatic structure that appeals to the phenomenological perspective of humans interpreted in the world, according to their tools and relationships. The fallibility of memory will lead to the finitude of humanity and inevitably to the finitude and fallibility of photography as a medium. The circle closes so that next year we will be able to start anew.

– by Raluca Oancea