SANDRA KRIŽIĆ ROBAN

Chrystel Lebas: The Translator of Nature

In the opinion of Simon Schama, there are two kinds of Arcadia: one is smooth, slow-paced, and entirely quietened down, while the other is overgrown with weeds, condensed, and pathless. The former is a place of idyllic vacation, while in the latter we feel some kind of uncertainty, uneasiness, maybe even panic. In places Chrystel Lebas has visited it is possible to feel, or at least to sense, both of these. In her earlier series, the feeling of time was expressed in a different way than today; she insisted on immobility, on a lasting quality that would mark the particular place she would pick, with the artist sometimes hiding on hunting platforms for hours, lurking for special moments in almost the same way a hunter lies in wait for his prey (“The Wait”, 2007). In her series “Abyss” (2003 – 2006) and “Blue Hour” (2005 – 2006), the landscape into which she walked interested her primarily as a link that helped her connect historical events, tales, and memories that she had inherited or adopted in her childhood. Deep forests are entirely devoid of human presence, so that even her temporary presence there is hardly noticed. Thanks to an awareness of how many hours she has actually spent awaiting a certain set of colour and light properties, achieved by using her devices and tools to the utmost limits of their abilities, we interpret her working manner – characterised by not stepping into the space and a non-interference into the continuity that determines the quality of photography – primarily as a document of lastingness and durability; as a confirmation of the author’s attitude that, in order to see, it is sufficient to observe long enough.

Her shots from previous years were mostly made at dusk, that particular time between day and night (like the French saying entre chien et loup, which could be translated as “between dog and wolf”), when narrative elements can be introduced into a scene and connected into an imaginary complex that abolishes the boundaries between the imagined, the experienced, and the expected. The original French phrase entre chien et loup describes the twilight zone, the period when the observed scene is blurred “and in a new way creates boundaries between the known and the unknown, maybe even the non-cognizable, between intellect and instinct.”

Text feature in Camera Austria International 110/2010, pp. 11–22.

FLORIAN EBNER

Arno Gisinger: A conversation with Florian Ebner

Florian Ebner: Konstellation. Walter Benjamin en exil is the title of your latest publication, a book that marks the end, for the time being, of a work in progress that has lasted several years. It contains photographs of the places of exile of the philosopher Walter Benjamin between 1933 and 1940, based on quotations from his letters. To me, this work appears to be an – albeit unusual – kind of homage. Considering that you have been dealing with the visual representation of history in your art for over fifteen years, the choice of Benjamin is certainly no coincidence, so the first point of interest is which aspects coincide in this “constellation”.

Arno Gisinger: Konstellation. Walter Benjamin en exil does in fact bring together many facets of the central question that I have been examining for many years: what role does the photography medium play in the construction of history and memory? The idea was to take photographs at those places that Benjamin visited during his exile and from where he wrote letters. This confrontation of text and pictures created a special fertile dialectic relationship between the past and the present, a new “constellation”, if you like, of place and time. According to Walter Benjamin, an “image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation”.

FE: And you capture this “flash” by means of photography, or rather, you actually provoke or construct it by means of the special arrangement of image and text. How does the text charge the image and how does the image charge the text? And what discharges then? For your pictures do without the empathetic view of “retracing history”, the old, nostalgic-suggestive model. Their firm point of reference is the present day.

AG: I collaborated with the French Benjamin biographer Nathalie Raoux on this project. In addition to her historical research, we were also accompanied by Benjamin’s correspondence on all of our travels, something that had a profound influence on the act of taking photographs. In a way, the letters told me what to take photographs of and how to take them. Slowed by the tripod and with great precision and depth of field, these “stills” follow in the vein of nineteenthcentury documentary visual tradition. I had Eugène Atget’s photographs and Benjamin’s comparison with “crime scene photographs” in mind. Benjamin’s places of exile, if you visit them today, are really non-places. In almost all cases, the photographs testify to the futility of looking for traces of the past in the present. Only the letters and historical knowledge suggest that we read traces. That is why the “constellation” of chronology and topography I mentioned to begin with only comes about by combining selected quotations with the photographs. The photograph, as Benjamin himself felt, is the ideal means of demystifying, de-auratising art. It allows us to depict reality and, at the same time, to achieve disassociation in perception. Just as Erwin Piscator’s or Bertold Brecht’s theatre breaks away from pure empathy so as to save the stage as an instrument of enlightenment. In this sense, I use my camera not so much as a means of production with which to take beautiful pictures, but rather as a reader that helps me see the world differently and rearrange it by means of montage.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 110/2010, pp. 23–34.

MAREN LüBBKE-TIDOW

Arne Schmitt: Makeshift Realms

In a continuous projememoryct, Arne Schmitt takes photographs from moving trains. These are pictures captured while approaching larger cities. Yet in hardly any of the scenes depicting excerpted views is the concrete locale discernable. The prospect from the train window fails to facilitate a representative view of the urban space – on the contrary: the sight remains obfuscated. The bottom third of the pictures is dedicated to the railway embankment with its tracks and ruderal flora. Urban development conceptions don’t target the visual configuration of fundament in such areas, and the buildings behind the tracks rampantly tower with considerable anarchic flair. The photographs soberly present the visual phenomena with surprising spatial density, yet in the process of beholding the series, the view increasingly ricochets off the surface, taking on a note of emptiness. Schmitt could work to counteract this dynamic by specifying locations, maybe through titling, so as to spur on a pursuit of traces. But instead he forwards the (for photography paradoxical) moment of withholding information – paradoxical for in a photograph all visual facts are always inherently exposed. Schmitt, however, emphasises this aspect of the “unlogical” perspective by overwriting the series with “Fatigue”. This contrast between urban space, precisely res searched through photographic means, and (perceptual) space, poetically codified through the title, represents a typical strategy employed by Schmitt. His working approach makes apparent – beyond an exploration of forms of an “unadulterated” documentarism – an artistic stance where the question of the relationship between reality and perceptibility, as controversial as ever for photography, is subject to negotiation.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 110/2010, pp. 35–41.

JEFF DERKSEN

Art and Cities during Mega-Events. On the Intersection of Culture, Everyday Live, and the Olympics in Vancouver and Beyond. Part III

In parts I and II of this column, I reflected on the thick anticipation that the Games would occupy the city as zombie force, clamping down and clogging up the streets with the $900 million Integrated Security Unit, the distrusted Olympic Organising Committee (VANOC), and international tourists. Countering this a convergenceand coalition of artists, activists, civil society groups and social justice advocates formed a crest of opposition aiming to wrestle the city back, with all of its contradictions and possibilities, from the flat and affectless vision of the city as Brand Vancouver, a nature-drenched lure for those global citizens hoping to lay down capital in a green city vibrating with the post-fordist pleasures of investment and tourism. But, as Henri Lefebvre opens his speculation on the events and situations of 1968, “Events belie forecasts: to the extent that the events are historical, they upset calculations”. To rework Lefebvre for the situation of the Olympics and the explosive, affective, and annulled events throughout the city, what was forecast did not always materialise and the calculations of the opposing sides
were less predictable than the lead-up promised.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 110/2010, pp. 60–61.