Information must always cross a threshold before it can be communicated to consciousness. A medium is required, something to ensure that the information can reach the other side and that, once it has arrived, it can be understood the way it was intended. A camera can of course act as that medium and represent information visually, and language itself, the very words we must use to render our thoughts comprehensible, is also a means with which to cross the threshold.
The information we receive then piles upon itself like the strata of rock formations, which show their history simultaneously, the past and present merging into a giant structure.
The condition of (artistic) labor is one to which I am always seem to return to when I consider a new work. My preoccupation with uncovering or rereading previously sculpted histories, forever shuffle through and digging into archives, has fueled my fascination with archaeology and the anthropological unearthing of lost narratives. More recently, my interest in labor as not only a necessary component of creating art, but also as the amount of physical energy that humans have, throughout history, applied to nature in order to exploit its materials, has led me to seek out areas where hard physical labor and the process of revelation converge, namely, in mining.
The work duskdust (to be completed as book work in early 2016 and as a photographic work later next spring) deals with a former cement factory turned into an Eco-friendly boutique hotel. One of the remaining mountains of cement rubble becomes the protagonist of the work. The sun renders the mountain’s resolution and colors for my high resolution camera, to become digital noise in some parts. In the work, another sun emerges, which is the lava in the oven heating up the rocks in order to crash to dust and to become cement. This act of light is controlled 24/7 by the workers in the factory. The mountain reflects both suns and questions the capacity of the eye to see, erasing material, calculation sight.
The work challenges the medium in which digital photographs enter spatial dimensions. It renders the act of crashing mountain into dust into a light absorbing material.
Susanne Kriemann, September 2015