155 | 2021

SILVIA FRANCESCHINI

The Landscape as an Archive: On Poetic Inheritance and Cross-Cultural Imagination

In his solo exhibition Maintenir la distance (Maintaining the Distance, 2017) at the Maison Henri et Marcelle Prévot in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc presented a letter written by his mother. In the letter she recounts her journey by canoe on the Maroni River, which separates Guiana from Suriname, looking for a house to buy on the riverbank near St. Laurent, where her grandparents used to live and work as gold diggers. In 1984 she acquired a small house in Wacapou, a derelict former gold mining village. She describes it as a house with beautiful interiors, full of cups and kitchenware in glass and porcelain, illumi­nated through the window shutters. The person who sold it was named Joseph Bernes, a creole from the island of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean who moved to French Guiana to try his luck as a gold miner in the late 1930s. The biography of Joseph Bernes becomes an indirect link to Abonnenc’s personal past and a guide to a region haunted by postcolonial trauma. The installation Against All Firearms, Highway Robbers, Incendiaries, Witches and Evil Spirit (2015–ongoing) is thus built around a box filled with Bernes’s private papers, which were found in the house after it was sold to the artist’s mother. The collection of handwritten letters, payrolls, books of prayers, and maps details a cartography of his travels, providing evidence of the subordinated lives of economic migrants under the rule of the French colonial empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. Panning for gold along the Maroni River was the fate of many creoles who had escaped plantations after the abolition of slavery.

In the same exhibition the artist also showed Forever Weak and Ungrateful (2015),¹ a series of heliogravure prints portraying a sta­tue of Victor Schoelcher, a French statesman who worked towards the abolition of slavery in the French Overseas Territories. Designed by the sculptor Louis Ernest-Barrias in 1896, the statue depicted Schoelcher with one arm around the shoulders of a slave, and stood in a central square in Cayenne.² Abonnenc focuses the gaze of the viewer on particular elements of the monument so as to highlight the discreet dynamics animating the two bodies and to reframe the asymmetrical power relations represented in the particular
“abolitionist imagery” on which this statue is based. Near this piece, a few dried flowers lay on a white cotton ground (Eurydice, 2017). The flowers were collected from the tomb of the artist’s great grandmother during the Days of the Dead, as the artist used to do as a child while living in French Guiana, before moving to France at the age of fifteen.

¹ The work Forever Weak and Ungrateful was commissioned for the Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. The title of the work is a critical deconstruction of the inscription on the statue, “La Guyane Reconnaissante” (The Grateful Guiana).
² The statue was toppled in 2020 along with two statues of Victor Schoelcher in Martinique, in the context of the global Black Lives Matter movement, which critically questions the violence of such forms of representation in public spaces.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 155/2021, pp. 9–22.

INES SCHABER

Observing, Participating, Objectifying—Questions About the Function of the Images in Pierre Bourdieu’s Photographic Archive

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pierre Bourdieu took photographs within the framework of his research on the change in society resulting from colonization in Algeria. Apart from the photographs created there, his photographic archive also contains a small series of pictures from his home region in France that he made at roughly the same time. The project of transferring this photographic legacy to Camera Austria in Graz started in the early 2000s, and, in 2003, one year after Bourdieu’s death, the exhibition Pierre Bourdieu: Images d’Algérie, une affinité élective (Pierre Bourdieu: In Algeria, Testimonies of Uprooting) opened at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and at Camera Austria in Graz. During the years that followed, the exhibition, curated by Christine Frisinghelli and Franz Schult­heis, was presented at more than twenty other locations, with a book published in parallel.¹ Today, the archive is stored in an unasumming metal cabinet in the depot which is located in the basement of Camera Austria on the Lendkai in Graz. It is accessible by appointment for research purposes. The institution makes individual pictures available upon request, and information about the project can be found on the website. I read that the archive today includes 994 black-and-white negatives (each 6 by 6 centimeters in size), nine 35mm color slides, and 216 contact sheets and work prints.² It also includes 230 photographic prints from the time at which the photos were taken, various folders containing notes, as well as boxes holding material associated with exhibitions, one video cassette, and a box with miscellaneous contents.³ Reinhard Braun invites me to visit it: “Take a look and see what you see.”

¹ Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli, eds., Pierre Bourdieu: In Algerien, Zeugnisse der Entwurzelung (Graz: Camera Austria, 2003); Images d’Algérie, une affinité élective (Paris: Actes Sud, 2003); Pierre Bourdieu: Picturing Algeria (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
² See https://camera-austria.at/fotoarchiv-pierre-bourdieu (accessed in July 2021). The part that was transferred to Camera Austria in 2001 was supplemented, in 2017, by a second, newly discovered compilation of materials. The entire archive has been digitized since 2019.
³ According to Frisinghelli, the 230 prints were archived in three photo albums and a folder when they were obtained. Today, digital prints have been substituted for the original prints in the albums, and the originals safeguarded in boxes. Several folders with digital prints of all the photographs in the archive are found in the office of Camera Austria.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 155/2021, pp. 23–36.

JACOB KORCZYNSKI

Interpreters and Interruptions*

Jacob Korczynski My thinking about your practice is informed by your use of found images, how you take them as material, and the ethics of how we as viewers engage with these appropriated materials. I wanted to begin by asking how you source and choose the documents you accumulate, given that you work across multiple media, including drawing, video, film, and photography.

Jean-Paul Kelly I think most of the use of found documentary materials begins with the eruption of an image in my mind and trying to find a form to communicate it. Usually, it’s through a hypnagogic state on the verge of sleep, where an image suddenly arrives. When it does, I don’t want to demystify it. I like the defamiliarization around such apparitions, their heady completeness. There’s a troubling transcendentalism at work. But I don’t trust that image. And I try to find other images to describe and understand it.

Since childhood, I’ve had an economy of means for making images and rendering them. There weren’t life-drawing models around, so I would find bodies I could reference in magazines for news, fashion, or men’s fitness. I would lay them out on the ground and look at different portions and positions and combine them into a single, complete pose that I had in mind. I would sort of intuit the image I desired from the collision of these images. Of course, now I use Google Images or other image search engines to collect my reference sources, but this core associational and collagist strategy remains the same for my work, whether drawing, video, photo, or sculpture. This selection process of images is filtered through a slow, conscious reading and understanding of the materials I find: how an image or sound functions aesthetically and graphically, how it pleases me and affixes or destabilizes my desires and biases, what it threatens, its violence—and how it changes through use.

For instance, for a residency and subsequent exhibition at the Delfina Foundation in London, I began research into the limits of the documentary image by attending Magistrates’ Court as an observer. A common law of contempt in the UK’s Criminal Justice Act prohibits photography while in open justice proceedings in order to protect individual rights, but it also exerts control on citizens by restricting their ability to make photographs. I was interested in this complicated space and my access to it: in being in a room stripped of image-making possibilities and in how those limitations would ask me to alter my work and confront my own ethics and the impact of incarceration on my own family.

* The title of this interview references a forthcoming video by Jean-Paul Kelly, Interpreters and Interpretations (2022). This in-process work is named after a volume of writing by Carl Van Vechten, the early twentieth-century photographer, dance critic, and notorious patron of the Harlem Renaissance. The episodic structure of Interpreters and Interpretations is also guided by a restaged interview with the art theorist Craig Owens (inset images on pages 37 and 38). Cast as “interpreter,” Owens’s thinking on the “critique of representation” refracts with all other elements in the video’s montage, including augmented documentary media featuring John Ashbery, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Paul Cadmus, Félix González-Torres, and Frank O’Hara, alongside Van Vechten.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 155/2021, pp. 37–50.