The College of Fine Arts
The University of New South Wales
Master of Fine Arts
Research Documentation
2009
à la dérive
Izabela Pluta Abstract The title of this paper refers to a sense of being in drift. The French term à la dérive seemed appropriate to adopt because the work was conceived and made in France, and the meaning of it umbrellas the ideas I have attempted to explore in my MFA.
à la dérive is comprised of two parts. Firstly, the paper presents an investigation of several ideas and concerns revolving around the broad notion of the concept ‘place’. In this paper, the concept of ‘place’ addresses a physical definition of belonging that exists within a specific cultural framework. I discuss Marc Augé’s theory of place in relation to Nikos Papastergiadis’ idea of the absence of it through diaspora. Importantly the relevance of these ideas to my creative interests stem from my personal history and dual nationality (Polish-Australian) as well as the notion of absence and presence in the concept ‘place’.
Secondly, the paper then discusses these theories in relation to the various works I have produced over the past two and a half years, including photographs, photo mural installations, collected objects, prints and drawings. Here I refer directly to artists including Tacita Dean, Simryn Gill, Peter Bialobrzeski and Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette. These artists inspire and provoke me to consider why I make work, what influences have defined my practice and why I respond to particular places. It has been important to identify these interests in order to learn from what has always been an intuitive art making process. I am drawn to how each artist considers aspects of place, time, history, nostalgia and temporality.
I conclude by discussing three projects that comprise my MFA practical work: Making Traces (2007), in (and against) time (2009) and à la dérive (2009). ‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis.
I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’ Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Debra Phillips, who has throughout this process been an amazing thinker, important critic and an inspiring mentor. I would also like to thank Johanna Trainor, my editor and friend, for her knowledge, critical eye and meticulous attention to my words and ideas. Thank you to my parents who have endured this process long distance, and Paulo Macchia who supports my endeavors every day. “I often come out here, said Uncle Kasimir, it makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where”.1
1 This quote is from The Emigrants, a novel by W.G. Sebald. The story is told in first person by the nephew of Great Uncle Adelwarth. During a visit to his Aunty Fini’s and Uncle Kashmir’s bungalow in the Ceder Glen West, the family drove to the Atlantic coast, and walked the sands of New Jersey, where the space they saw encompassed them between the submerged mainland and the waters edge. The storyteller’s other uncle, Uncle Kasimir, a German Jew who fled to New York in the thirties, reminisced the past, recalling relatives and the long history of their migration to America. W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, Vintage, London, 2002, p.89
[ 5 ] [plate 1] Izabela Pluta Untitled (ships), 2009 artist proof
[ 6 ] Contents
Abstract 2
Introduction 8
Part 1: Framework 10 Place/Space 10 Place: in the postcard 13 Architecture: in between places 16 Home: the significance of origin 18 Interior place: photo mural as façade 20 Photography 26 Tacita Dean 30 Simryn Gill 35 Peter Bialobrzeski 40 Neorealist film 46
Part 2: Projects 49 Site and Serendipity 49 Home(land) 50 …to be drifting 63 Making Traces 64 in (and against) time 84 à la dérive 96
Conclusion 107
Illustrations 110
Appendix 120
Bibliography 132
[ 7 ] Introduction This research project has developed as an exploration of the significance of ‘place’–real and imagined, and examines ways that place is manifested or experienced. Importantly the relevance of these ideas to my creative interests stem from my personal history and dual nationality (Polish-Australian) as well as the notion of absence and presence in the concept ‘home’. Although I do not consider the work that I make forming a type of biographical self-analysis, I seem, however, to have an obsession with the significance of ‘place’ and the idea of diaspora2. ‘Place’ within my own experience of dislocation and inherent psyche of diaspora results from traversing between different cultures and establishing a new home in Australia after immigrating here 22 years ago.
In this paper, the concept of ‘place’ addresses a physical definition of belonging that exists within a specific cultural framework. In relation to this idea, the term ‘place’ also describes a physical area (one that may also be considered empty) or a distance between physical places. The notion of ‘space’ on the other hand is used to address a psychological space–one’s frame of mind or psyche that is a consequence of diaspora. As Marc Augé describes the term in Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity3, the elastic meaning of ‘space’ cannot define a specific or physical area, as the word suggests open-endedness or an incomplete void.
In Part One I give an overview of the notion of place and one’s relationship to it. I then continue to speculate on the imagined place and discuss my interest in the postcard souvenir, followed by the psychological space one may experience as a result of shifting home–here I explore ideas from Nikos Papastergiadis’ book, Dialogues in the Diasporas: essays and conversations on cultural identity4. My thoughts on home and longing for place are then elaborated upon where I explore the significance of origin. Finally, I discuss my interest in the medium of photography and its role in cultural experience–both as an object and image that occupies the social world. I reflect on the historical use of photo murals
2 Throughout this paper I return to particular ideas explored by Marc Augé in Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, London, New York, 1995 and Nikos Papastergiadis in Dialogues in the diasporas: essays and conversations on cultural identity, New York University Press, New York, 1998 3 Marc Augé claims that the word ‘space’ seems to have allocated it’s meaning from it’s application in advertising and the contemporary classification of territories or areas. ibid. 4 Papastergiadis. op.cit.
[ 8 ] and return to my own interest in the material that was hung in most room’s of my grandmother’s house in Poland, where I grew up. I am interested in the photo mural because it suggests both a real and imagined place through photography’s indexical nature, while its materiality alludes to an escapist fantasy from the ordinary living room to another place.
In Part Two I discuss my methodology, and the way I approach locations for the purpose of making images. I have always been drawn to sites that, for me, invoke a longing for place, for example redundant urban landscapes and dilapidated buildings–sites that appear universal and drift between an actual place and a past place. Like Eduardo Cadava explains, “This oscillation between space and time, between distance and proximity touches on the very nature of filmic media, whose structure consists in the simultaneous reduction and maximization of distance”.5 My interest is in the photographic image and how it becomes removed from the moment of reality therefore suggesting a psychological disconnection from the place.
I continue by discussing the work of Tacita Dean, Simryn Gill, Peter Bialobrzeski and Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette. I am drawn to how each artist considers aspects of place, time, history, nostalgia and temporality. These terms I weave in and out of the discussions in this paper, and return to where I consider my own work by speculating on my experience of places–where the photograph was taken, the experience of the place as mediated through the photograph, and the experience of the photograph itself. I firstly discuss two works made before I began my MFA: Home(land) (2006) and Making Mirrors (2006). I have included these as they are important points of departure that may elucidate where my interests have derived from. I conclude with an examination of three projects that comprise my MFA: Making Traces (2007), in (and against) time (2009) and à la dérive (2009). The best part of this work was undertaken during a residency at the Cité International des Arts, Paris in 2008. I became interested in locations where a notion of an ‘in-between space’ may be evoked: one that for me possessed signs of loss, longing and emptiness.
5 Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Thesis on the Photography of History, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1997, p.XXV
[ 9 ] Part 1: Framework
Place/Space
To further explore the complexity of place, real and imagined, and the influences of the past on the present, I begin by considering a contemporary actuality: a sense of loss as experienced through cultural dislocation. It seems I can never escape this inquiry, as it stems from my experience as a migrant to Australia. I seem driven to observe, contemplate and question the lives of family and friends who, over the past twenty years, have adapted, made home, and continually re- evaluate their place in their new home land, while they re-visit and long for their ‘mother’ country, and question their decision to move in the first place.
In Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Marc Augé highlights the difference between space and place: A place includes an anthropological place, one that has a purpose, identity, a connection or reference to history (or cultural significance). He describes his theory of ‘supermodernity’ based on the emptying of the consciousness, the dissolving of the gaze into the landscape and at the same time becoming indifferent to it.6 His definition of non-place categorises two realties, the space itself and one’s relationship to it. An anthropological space that creates a social interaction (formed by its connection to history), and a non-place enacting a solitude through its ‘psychological distance’.
Auge’s notion of space centers’ on the non-symbolic and abstract, the temporary, and exists away from the tangible place.7 These are also the pivotal mechanisms in which I consider place and space. I see the notion of ‘space’ as the abyss between being connected and disconnected from a place: here and there, in the physical place of home and the psychological space of the imagination. In doing so, I consider how we may manifest ourselves in the present and make a ‘home’, or belong to, or achieve a connectedness to place.
6 Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, p.93 7 Augé uses the term ‘non-place’ to describe transient spaces like airports, railway stations, parks and complex hybrid spaces, which have been developed from supermodernity. The loss of identity and authenticity in these spaces is a result of the past and present breaking the anthropological place characterised by history, thereby eliminating the relevance of its residents and the cultural context that surrounds a place. Places are no longer what they were, he claims, their identity is dissolved. He suggests that as we shift (through globalisation) we loose the strength of our cultural identity. This is discussed in greater detail and made relevant to the theories of Michel de Certeau. ibid. p.82
[ 10 ] Lucy Lippard in her book, The lure of the local: senses of place in a multicentered society, also suggests place is created through human experience. Place is “a portion of land/town/cityscape seen from the inside, the resonance of a specific location that is known and familiar”.8 That place is a “layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there”.9
Perhaps it is through movement that we are emptied of meaning and discover that making a place becomes more difficult than we could have imagined? Or, maybe these migratory shifts to new places have no meaning for us? Is there a way we can belong whilst still in transience?10
Movement seems to provide a solitude, that moving through and experiencing these spaces and non-places offers a certain ‘melancholy pleasure’ “…we are able to find prophetic evocations of spaces in which neither identity, nor relations, nor history really make any sense; spaces in which solitude is experienced as an overburdening or emptying of individuality, in which only the movement of the fleeting images enables the observer to hypothesize the existence of a past and glimpse the possibility of a future”.11
Referencing Michel de Certeau, Augé establishes that the act of passing (places on a freeway, or in travelling through them as a tourist) causes “a loss of focus” and registers this as the “horizon of every journey (accumulation of places, negation of place)”. He goes on to say, “the movement that ‘shifts lines’ and traverses place is, by definition, creative of itinerates: that is words and non- places”.12 Augé also poses the notion of space as coming from the experience of the moving traveller and that the landscape through which he moves becomes a collection of fragmentary glimpses. Comprising hundreds of snippets of images their mind has captured, the recollection of the experience is told on
8 Lucy Lippard, The lure of the local: senses of place in a multicentered society, New Press, New York, 1997, p.7 9 ibid. 10 Miwon Kwon uses the concept “wrong place” to discuss how one may imagine a new model of “belonging-in-transience”–countering a rooted place of belonging which we may become nostalgic for, and embracing a nomadic ‘fluidity’ of movement, while remaining antinostalgic. One place after another: Site specific art and locational identity, The MIT Press, London, 2004, p.8 11 Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, p. 87 12 ibid. p. 85
[ 11 ] the traveller’s return, and as a result a “fictional relationship between gaze and landscape”13 is created.
“The moment you arrive you have departed. As you leave you have begun a new experience. The fluid movements of our arrivals and departures map threads of intertwined experiences in transitory space. Within the pockets of personal space we carry memories, aspirations and secrets. These resonant whispers mark our personal cartographies in the public realm”.14
Augé describes in detail the journey of Pierre Dupont by plane from Paris across Europe to the Mediterranean. In this process, he eloquently reminds us of the everyday, of driving to the airport, checking in 20kg of baggage, requesting the preferred seat, and finally taking position in idle whilst awaiting his voyage of flight. Augé ponders the possibility of adventure, the feeling of openness and excitement of what is to come, and how we surrender ourselves to the transitory moments of these uncertain spaces at the airport or the train platform or the waiting room.15
Evident not only in Australia’s population but also in many other first world countries, people emigrate for work, refuge, pleasure or to seek a better life. I believe that by traversing between one place and another in a world where travel is becoming easier, faster and more affordable, global geography appears smaller and the desire to always be somewhere else is becoming more commonplace. As such, the significance of place (origin) may be lost, that we will come to exist only within a temporal locale and always in transit.
Perhaps the notion of place as we now experience the world, through temporality, puts us at the crisis of meaning? We may desire to be somewhere else, but once we are away from home, all we do is long to be back there and crave that sense of belonging even more. The abundance of available places to experience perpetuates a dislocation for us and from our place of home, depositing us in a kind of ‘limbo’. Augé suggests this is caused by the
13 Discussed by Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, p.86 14 Chris Thomas Allan is quoted writing about an exhibition curated by The Light Surgeons, “Articulated - Mapping the thresholds between the public and private space”, http://www. ctrln.net/journal/archives/articulated-mapping-the-thresholds-between-the-public-and-private/ (accessed12 Nov. 2008) 15 Augé, op.cit. p.1–6
[ 12 ] ‘supermodern’ situation, a time of excess. “…The spatial overabundance of the present…is expressed in changes of scale, in the proliferation of imaged and imaginary references, and in the spectacular acceleration of means of transport”.16 He proposes that time is overloaded and the saturation of events hinder the past and the present, generating a need to make sense of the world and our place within it.
The physical place of home, and how that concept manifests itself within a space inhabits my work. My interest lies in the possibility of imagining an alternative place, somewhere else, and how it may materialise in the psyche of travellers or migrants. And so I continually return to this desire for belonging, for finding place, one that has significance, and feels significant.
Place: in the postcard
“Certain places exist only through the words that evoke them, and in this sense they are non-places, or rather imaginary places: banal utopias, clichés”.17
Recently, whilst in Paris, I began collecting various souvenir albums from flea markets I visited. These included pictures from Italy, Belgium, Holland and Germany [Plate 2]. Some were collections of hand-tinted photo reproductions of tourist sites, others imaged tourist destinations packaged in concertina fold-out wallets. Printed mostly in the 1930’s and 1950’s, and brought back by tourists from their holiday destinations18, the postcard packs were subsequently shown alongside the holiday stories told to friends upon their return. Typically depicting
16 This paragraph discusses Augé’s concept of the two accelerated transformations in the contemporary world, our perception of time and space. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, pp.25–26, 29–31 17 Augé describes motorway travel and its ramifications on our experience. Our speed of travel, our nature to by-pass a town on the freeway, signed to have a historical landmark, winery or tourist lookout, deters us from stopping, as the commentary provided by the sign itself provides enough power in our minds to imagine what might be there. The words prescribe to us what is necessary to see on our travels. The landmarks marked out, seen or left ‘for next time’ when we pass again, become strangely familiar over time. He suggests the familiarity that is collected over consecutive or missed ‘non-experiences’ begins to embed a mark of association rather than actual experience, “… an absence of the place from itself”, and therefore asserts that without a name or a history, the place becomes a non-place. “This plurality of places, the demands it makes on the powers of observation and description, and the resulting feeling of disorientation, causes a break or discontinuity between the spectator-traveller and the space of the landscape he is contemplating or rushing through. This prevents him from perceiving it as a place, from being fully present in it…” ibid. pp.84–85, 95 18 Michael Frizot discusses the use of the postcard as a tourist souvenir, how it was a form of appreciation of the world through bringing back formal reproductions of ‘sequential accounts’ in these ‘postcards, concertina-folded multiple views’. Michael Frizot. et al, A New History of Photography, Köneman, Köln, 1994, p.753
[ 13 ] [plate 2] Collected postcards from Italy, Belgium, Holland and Germany. Some are hand-tinted photo reproductions of tourist sites, others image tourist destinations packaged in concertina fold-out wallets.
[ 14 ] near perfect scenes like mountain landscapes, lit with a particular glow that would mirror the surrounding lake, or vacant city streets with perfectly drifting clouds tinted in pastel colours, inviting tourists to visit and experience these magical places. As Susan Stewart suggests, these postcards then become the memory images of the place visited, evoking a nostalgic experience through the invented narrative or illusion created. That souvenirs are “‘magical objects’, who’s function is to ‘envelop the present with the past’”.19 In doing so, she advocates that they authenticate a past and query the present.
“The present experience is either too impersonal, too looming, or too alienating compared to the intimate and direct experience of contact which the souvenir has with its referent. The referent is authenticity. What lies between here and there is oblivion, a void marking a radical separation between past and present. The nostalgia of the souvenir plays in the distance between the present and an imagined, prelapsarian experience, experience as it might be ‘directly lived’. The location of authenticity becomes whatever is distant to the present time and space”.20
Like the daguerreotype, whose value as a physical object was at once a souvenir and tableau vivant,21 the image’s role extended beyond the photographic reproduction of a place or event. The photographic object seemed to be created as a way to ‘remember’ personal experience, where the invention of narrative was intrinsically linked. They were at once documents and constructions of reality. Stewart asserts this by saying that the “souvenir exemplifies the ‘capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience’”22, and reiterates that the souvenir is required in those instances where an experience can not be repeated, “..rather we need and desire souvenirs of those events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby only exist through the invention of the narrative”.23
19 Susan Stewart is quoted by Joan M. Schwartz in the essay “Un Beau Souvenir du Canada”. Elizabeth Edwards, et al. Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, Routledge, New York, 2004, p.24 20 Edwards, Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, p.24 21 The term Tableau vivant (correct plural ‘Tableaux vivants’), French for ‘living picture’, dates to the Nineteenth Century where painting and photography married the theatrical stage. Pictures of striking groups of costumed artist’s models were posed and often theatrically lit, and did not speak or move. In my investigation, I use their example for the way an image depicts a staged identity or event. 22 Stewart quoted by Schwartz. Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, p.24 23 ibid.
[ 15 ] The postcard, as object, never completes the narrative. As a souvenir it only has the capacity to suggest, it is can only ever be an illusion entwined with the reality of the place or event it pictures. “As an index, the photograph is never itself, by its very nature a trace of something else”.24
For me, the postcard sent from a place where one has holidayed, visited or passed through, presents an inherent image of that place. Receivers of the postcard are then able to imagine the destination for themselves. In appropriating found ephemera in my work, I am speculating on the symbolism of the postcard as both image and object. The postcard’s various layers convey meaning through it’s visual and physical characteristics, it’s historical reference and it’s ability to aid in the construction of memory.25 The relayed accounts or stories of places pictured may invoke associations and imaginative visions of what a place could be, generating fantasies and imaginings about a place of travel, holiday–somewhere else we would rather be or experience for ourselves.
The event now exists only in the invented ‘narrative’ of the object and materiality is no longer tangible. The scene pictured brings the experience back to life. The postcard as object evokes a nostalgia created through both its materiality (that of a precious object) and referent, and cannot escape the reality that holds it. The image is no longer separated from the trace of what was once there in front of the camera. The photograph becomes a keepsake or souvenir, and the desire for the object it represents is the event or a place it pictures.
Architecture: in between places
“By leaving home [migrants] create new connections with the rest of the world. In a fundamental sense they can never return to the place they have left. All attempts to recreate the original home will expose new gaps and tensions. Even
24 Geoffrey Batchen discusses the photograph as an indexical sign. Burning with Desire–The conception of photography, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1999, p.9 25 Schwartz in her essay “Un Beau Souvenir du Canada”, describes the significance of a particular daguerreotype, one which Captain Paul-Henri de Belvèze carried with him on return from Quebec City during a mission to restore economic and cultural relations between France and Canada in 1855. The image pictures a man posed with four boys in traditional costume. The daguerreotype was a gift for the wife of Napeloean III. Schwartz claims that “the object warrants scrutiny as object, image and symbolic space because its shifting cultural meanings are deeply embedded in the complex relationships between visuality and physicality, object and narrative, history and memory, author and audience, indexicality and instrumentality”. Edwards, Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, p.16
[ 16 ] a brief glance at the interior of a migrant home reveals a disjunctive assemblage of cultural signs”.26
Architecture may be able to provide us with a reminder of our cultural identity or place. By being in-between an ‘old’ and ‘new’ home an interstitial space develops–a non-physical space of being dislocated–a psyche that may be linked to a sense of cultural dislocation. Papastergiadis suggests that moving the ‘home’ to a different place cannot maintain its original essence, consequently it is altered, or we are altered as we move, and so is our manifestation of home. There is a disjunction of ‘cultural signs’ when the new home is recreated.
“…we bring our lairs with us”.27
The idea of moving between places, and how one manifests a ‘home’ in a new location fascinates me and resonates throughout my work. This is a particular concern of mine, and comes from my own personal experience with my family, friends and people I have connected with in my life who have shifted homes, typically first generation migrants from countries like Poland, Italy, former Yugoslavia and Greece to Australia. These immigrants represent a cross section of the ‘new’ Australians that settled here from the 1970’s onwards. My family migrated to Australia in 1987, and hence the choice of this particular demographic. Taking these encounters as points of departure in considering how moving may have affected the aesthetic and material fabric of their homes, and drawing parallels from how they lived (the décor, furniture, architecture) in their former home land, to how they assemble a new home here. In many cases, material possessions from the home country were shipped from the old home into the new.28 These objects seem to embody a memory of the past: a much stronger connection of longing is given to these objects now they are in the new place. Do these possessions create a nostalgia for materiality that once held less importance? If material possessions reinstate a sense of belonging, then perhaps having them around helps in achieving a greater sense of connectedness.
26 Nikos Papastergiadis, “Mobility and the Nation: Skins, Machines and Complex Systems”, STATIC, 02, March 2006, p.18 27 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994, p.5 28 My family brought with them an entire shipping container of all their furniture and belongings when we came to Australia in 1987
[ 17 ] Eduardo Cadava, in Words of Light: Thesis on the Photography of History, draws on a passage by Marcel Proust. Awakening in a dark room, Proust finds himself disoriented in the space, unable to identify the room, furniture or location. Images flash before him of past and present memories, moving before him so quickly, that he is unable to orient himself with either reality in the present moment, in the past or with any associated mental picture.
Defining cultural dislocation as a ‘translational framework’, Papastergiadis states that the map travelled creates a cultural phenomenon. He analyses the term diaspora and maintains that it is not simply about moving and placing the old home into the new, foreign place. The culture of diaspora cannot be like a seed, be moved, planted and made fit somewhere else. “The homeland is, for a diasporic sensibility, both absent and present”.29
While Gaston Bachelard reminds us of the significance and effect on us of the concept of home30 “…there is one privileged place where origin and destiny intersect”.31 The desire that manifests itself in the everyday activity of building a ‘home’ in actuality is a juggling act of preserving the old and adopting the new, re-evaluating a sense of place, putting down roots and dealing with change. Of particular significance, it is how cultural identity is reflected, forged, transcended and adapted in a new location. That the detachment from place that one feels is ultimately a direct result of traversing between communities, the importance of home and a yearning to belong.
Home: the significance of origin
The symbolic and the material place, has great significance in the making of home, both physically and psychologically.
“Walls protect us, comfort us, and many rooms are invested with great psychological resonance. Our understanding of time and space begins with the room, the basic unit of architecturally defined space”.32
29 Papastergiadis, Dialogues in Diasporas, p.xi 30 Bachelard investigates our perceptions of home, and the way in which we manifest our memories and who we are based on our experiences of the house in The Poetics of Space. 31 Papastergiadis, op.cit. p.2 32 Bill Arning, et.al. Inside Space: Experiments in Redefining Rooms, MIT List Visual Arts Centre, New York, 2001, pp.30–31
[ 18 ] In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard argues that the idea of one’s first house– where one grew up–forms one’s idea of home; we therefore have a memory of that space which surpasses consciousness.33 Memory binds us to our first home, and provides us with a sense of place and an ongoing subconscious longing for it.
“Home is the centre of the world”.34
It seems to me that the notion of home can be instilled in a particular place–a house, city or country. Perhaps it may also be grounded in a psychological space that roots itself deeper than anything physical. Does a home then become symbolic, rather than physical, through boundaries that are emblematic, where a house becomes formed by structures and materiality?
According to Papastergiadis we manifest our culture in any place where we are, and this intervention forms a new aesthetic. I believe this occurs when one transports belongings (materiality), through memory (nostalgia for what one’s place once was), into a new context (a new home land), away from the original. A moment or memory image is taken at departure from the home land and frozen: time, place, feeling and sensual experiences are encapsulated and re- enacted through the embodiment of spaces in a new home. My interpretation is illustrated in the homes of migrants I have mentioned previously, where the décor, furniture, wallpaper, and architecture of the home, are symbolically adapted from their cultural heritage, and transported into a new home in their new country. The embellished façades, columns, credenzas, and interiors are perhaps not those one had in the home land. It seems to me they have been created here through the mental picture the individual has taken with them–a memory image that has subsequently distorted the reality of the place that was left, and created in a home here.
In The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton presents an argument for the importance of architecture and the spaces that we occupy. He explains the essence of a space and how it speaks to us; how a building can shape and unfold life around and within itself; how different types of architecture invite us to live, be influenced and shaped by their forms. “Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse,
33 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 34 Papastergiadis, Dialogues in Diasporas, p.2
[ 19 ] different people in different places–and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might really be”.35
As Louise Bourgeois concurs, “…the architecture has to be an object of your memory. When you summon, when you conjure the memory, in order to make it clearer, you pile up the associations the way you pile up bricks to build an edifice. Memory itself is a form of architecture”.36
I understand that one moves through the world carrying a fictitious memory (of association), and that over time is altered by time itself. This is perhaps what we refer to as ‘nostalgia’, a not so accurate awareness that forms one’s sense of place. Through his discussion of the house, Bachelard gives value to the spaces that we inhabit and how they shape our perception of home together with our imagination. I believe our sense of home is achieved through the memory image (of the home which has been left behind) and the imagination (the nostalgic longing for home) that forms the new aesthetic–a particular way of constructing our surroundings to achieve a sense of place. There is, as Papastergiadis puts it, a disjunction of ‘cultural signs’ when the new home is recreated, where shifting the ‘home’ to a different place displaces its original essence and so our manifestation of home is distorted.
Interior place: photo mural as façade
Wallpaper is used and referred to symbolically throughout my work. The medium embodies a space through its association to a place; it alludes to the ephemeral quality of time; and evokes the desire to be somewhere else.
My specific interest in photo mural wallpaper comes from it existing firstly, in my grandmother’s house where I grew up in Warsaw, Poland [Plate 3, 4]. In each of the rooms of the house one wall presented a panoramic vista of various forest settings: dark, mellow and layered with trees and ferns from foreground into the distant landscape. My understanding is that it was hung in many houses and apartments in Eastern Europe as a vehicle for providing an appealing landscape inside the home, when in the heaviest of winter the city was barren of any
35 Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness, Hamish Hamilton, Camberwell, 2006, p.13 36 Louise Bourgeois in conversation with the author, NY March 31, 1999. Jerry Gorovoy, et.al. Louise Bourgeois: Memory and Architecture, Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2000, p.26
[ 20 ] [plate 3] Photo mural wallpaper in my grandmother’s main bedroom, Warsaw, Poland, 1982
[ 21 ] [plate 4] Izabela age 5, in front of photo mural wallpaper in bedroom, Warsaw, Poland, 1984
[ 22 ] [plate 5] Documentation of Italian migrants home, Newcastle, NSW, 2009
[ 23 ] luscious natural beauty. While simultaneously, it projected an escape from the reality one existed within. Secondly, I have witnessed in various migrant’s homes, particularly those who arrived in the 1970’s, who have taken a similar aesthetic they grew up with in Europe, and re-created that ideal in their new homes here in Australia [Plate 5]. And lastly, referring to the idea of wallpaper as a surface, a covering device, able to witness a lifetime of events in a particular place.
Although our idea of wallpaper may be associated with a repetitive pattern, panels that cover and construct a fashionable interior, my interest lies more with the photo mural, a vision that occupied my everyday as a child. The photo mural is a type of wallpaper with registered panels that when laid constitute a ‘photographic’ image, and were always called a ‘tapeta’ (wallpaper in Polish) in my house. From here on, I will use the term ‘wallpaper’ when referring to a covering device that is made up of panels comprised of repetitive patterns. As I have previously illustrated, my interest here is specifically in the photographic image as a wallpaper, a covering device that constructs a façade, and so will only use the term ‘photo mural’ when I discuss its nature, history and particular relevance to my work.
Historically, wallpaper was used as a backdrop, something to establish a mood, an aesthetic of a room and to reveal the social status of its inhabitants [Plate 6]. Whilst in a contemporary context it may evoke a sense of nostalgia by suggesting past generations, for example a reminder of one’s great aunt’s living room from the 1970’s.
“Whatever you have in your rooms think first of the walls for they are which makes your house and home, and if you do not make some sacrifices in their favour you will find your chambers have a kind of makeshift, lodging-house look about them”.37
As William Morris palpably expresses in this quote, wallpaper is a covering device, coating a wall in a way that not only covers, but also conceals and represents an individual’s wish to convey how they are to be perceived by others. Psychologically it may provide a decoy, and physically “it is always pretending to be something else–tapestry, velvet, chintz, silk drapery, linen, wood,
37 A quote by William Morris. Gill Saunders, Wallpaper in Interior Decoration, Victoria and Albert Museum, V & A Publications, London, 2002, p.7
[ 24 ] [plate 6] Wilhelm Rehlen (c.1795-1831) The Drawing Room of the Princesses Sophie and Marie of Bavaria in the Schloss Nymphenburg, with Scenic wall paper La Grande Helvétie, c.1820 Watercolour
[ 25 ] masonry, a mural”.38 Presenting another reality or fiction through its imitative characteristics, wallpaper’s meretricious quality has an ability to draw us into a mis-led sense of belonging. Is it able to invoke a somewhat temporary relief of estrangement? Gill Saunders in her account of wallpaper’s history, published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, likens this quality to the character of Mrs. Plornish, in Dickens’ Little Dorrit. In the novel, the parlour had a wall painting depicting a cottage–a fantasy of a rural past for which the book’s character yearned.39
The French ‘scenic’ and ‘landscape’ wallpapers (papiers-peints paysages) included a repertoire of exotic locations, some mythological and fantastical, others representational. Suggesting that they were used to provide an avenue into the imagination, of the possibility of imaging a world somewhere else, and through the view into the panoramic vista, the curiosity of the “ ‘armchair traveler’ who may ‘experience for himself the journeys that provided the subject matter’ without the trouble of leaving the apartment”.40
Each time a room is decorated, the wallpaper defines it’s character with the occupant’s desired identity manifested in the space. Saunders likens this to the interest that some nineteenth-century novelists have found in using the metaphor of wallpaper in their characters. “Thus both (Thomas) Gaskell and (Mrs) Hardy articulate a view of wallpaper as meretricious. In both these instances, new wallpaper is advocated by those who are shallow and false, in- comers with no attachment to the past and the concomitant values cherished by other morally superior characters. These literary details confirm wallpaper’s long association with deception and illusion, and with the rejection of tradition and integrity”.41
Photography
In my work, photography is employed firstly as a medium that represents the real–in that it holds information of the visible world. A photograph is able, in a certain way, to image an absent object, or absent place. This may be depicted as
38 Saunders, Wallpaper in Interior Decoration, p.7 39 ibid. p.97 40 Joseph Dunfour quoted by Saunders. ibid. p.90 41 ibid. p.7
[ 26 ] an actual and tangible place or as a trace of one, but what it represents to me is an imaged place and an imagined one. Each place becomes simultaneously present (in the image) and at once absent, from our present reality. As Roland Barthes suggests there is a “superimposition here: that of reality and of the past”.42 As Barthes notably demonstrates through his analysis of the found portrait of his mother in Camera Lucida, the past that the photographic image presents to us has no access.
Geoffrey Batchen describes the photograph as depicting “… a set of objects in fixed spatial relations at a given moment in real time. It [the photograph] fixes in place that moment lived before the camera, a moment external to the picture’s own compositional organisation of temporal coordinates”.43 He goes on to write, “Talbot concluded that the primary subject of every photograph was therefore time itself”.44 Photographs allude to a mechanical process (that of capturing the passing of time on the film plane) and hint at a temporal duration.
William Henry Fox Talbot’s interest in photography was not only in the image itself but also in the ideas centered around it, and its relationship to space and time. “Talbot spoke of the new medium as a peculiar articulation of temporal and spatial coordinates. Photography is apparently a process in which ‘position’ is ‘occupied’ for a ‘single instant’, where ‘fleeting’ time is ‘arrested’ in the ‘space for a single minute’. It seems that he was able to describe the identity of photography only by harnessing together a whole series of binaries: art and shadows, the natural and magic, the momentary and the forever, the fleeting and the fettered, the fixed and that which is capable of change. Photography was, for Talbot, the desire for an impossible conjunction of transience and fixity. More than that, it was an emblematic something/sometime, a ‘space of a single minute’ in which space becomes time, and time space”.45
42 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: reflections on photography, Vintage, London, 1993, p.76 43 Batchen, Burning with Desire, p.93 44 Photography’s many inventors, including Henry Talbot, remarked on their aspirations to fix the moving images of nature found on the back of a camera obscura. ibid. 45 Batchen, op.cit. p.91
[ 27 ] [plate 7] Hiroshi Sugimoto Pacific Ocean, Iwate, 1986 Vintage Silver Gelatin Print 55 x 43 cm
[ 28 ] Kerry Brougher, writing on Hiroshi Sugimoto46 considers his tendency to use photography as a form of time travel [Plate 7]. “By removing the specificity of the scene, the artist captures not the sea but human memory, the memory of the confrontation with things yet unnamed, that still contain the majesty and mystery of the unknown and unanthropormorphized, something outside of the human mind and as such outside of human knowledge and control. Ultimately these works transcend the genre of the seascape, they are metaphysical images that speak of immateriality and conjure up ancient memories of mankind”.47
Sugimoto’s seascapes have been of particular interest to me because of the way he has returned to the use of the photographic image as a medium to record time and place holding a sense of wonder. Photography here allows us to rely on memory, imagination and a sense of awe. Artists are returning to the landscape to awaken our perception of time and experience and to position pictorialism alongside a romantic sensibility. I also adopt the medium for its ability to portray the visible world, thereby providing a contemplation of the nostalgic psyche while considering memory, time and space. Similar to Sugimoto’s imagery, my photographs possess no interference of location and cultural signs, they seem anonymous, vacant “compelling us to step past the frame, observe and determine, the meaning for ourselves”.48
The photograph operates as both object and image and occupies the social world in its role as cultural experience: photographs stimulate interactions that are sensuous (through their physicality), subjective (ways they are read and interpreted by the viewer), and embody space (personify the context they are placed into). My use of the photograph operates on a number of levels: as a
46 Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work highlight’s photography’s temporal dimension. The images in his Theatre series (1980–1995) recall the notion of time and how it is captured. Time is compressed and the duration collapses into a singe frame, while one is reminded of time passing and simultaneously the space that it is presented within–an architectural time piece from the 1920’3 or 1930’s, rich in ornamental details trapping our nostalgic desire for another time. They become real, yet play with perception and the imagination, oscillating between reality and fiction. In the bleached out screen we simultaneously see what has vanished and is about to appear–an in- between state that is intangible. Through the long exposure the camera captures time erasing itself to a glowing void. The Dioramas series (1980–1994) of three-dimensional natural history museum sets and the reality (or fiction) they represent, explores an evanescence, the real and fictitious object existing with the actual and constructed time of the camera. Wax sculptures, like photographs, normally seek to represent life accurately and truthfully. Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sugimoto, Fundaciâon “La Caixa”, Madrid, 1998 47 Kerry Brougher, et al. Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2005, p.134 48 Brougher, Hiroshi Sugimoto, p.132
[ 29 ] physical object, specifically the postcard, tactile and reminiscent of a place in one’s memory; as a ‘memory image’ probing desire for a place; as a subjective translation of my experience, which I explore in Part Two; and as a photo mural that alludes to a way home is manifested and the fantasy to be ‘somewhere else’ that a vista provides. Photographs cannot be separated from the experience they provide and their “volume, opacity, tactility and physical presence in the world”.49
Tacita Dean, Simryn Gill and Peter Bialobrzeski are artists that explore place, time, history and temporality while Neorealist film maker Vittorio De Sica evokes a nostalgia and optimism for life. I am drawn to how each artist speculates on these themes in their various photographic, object and film works.
Tacita Dean
In an essay on British artist Tacita Dean, Mark Godfrey considers the nature of photography’s unavoidable strength to reveal to the beholder what he or she may already know. He discusses how this may be evoked in relation to Dean’s work Floh (2001), a collection of found images from modern times [Plate 8]. Dean’s images seem to lack a narrative or system, and collectively reject any unity of the time or place from where they emanate. Through their de-contexualisation, the photographs draw a memory image of humanity though other people’s lives. “Layered with time, they trigger memories not of the people they show, but from the people who look at them”.50 It seems to me that through film and photography Dean draws links between actual and imagined experience, and perhaps between fact and fiction. My own work alludes to a slippage between two realities, of a present longing for a past, that I explore through photographs and found ephemera.
Dean’s work encompasses the experience of time, and presents us with the unlikely or accidental in the reality she stages, embellishes, or documents. Her process involves a ‘quest’ or search of events, moments, experiences and histories.51 My own interest in serendipity is influenced by Dean, a process that
49 Batchen quoted by Edwards, Photographs, Object, Histories, p.1 50 Mark Godfrey, Photography Found and Lost: On Tacita Deans’ Floh”, OCTOBER, Vol. 114, Fall 2005, p.119 51 Jean Christophe Royoux discusses Dean’s play with time, duration and history in Tacita Dean, Phaidon, London, 2006, p.50
[ 30 ] [plate 8] Tacita Dean Floh, 2001 Artist’s book made in collaboration with Maryn Ridgewell, Steidl, Gottingen
[ 31 ] [plate 9] Tacita Dean Disappearance at Sea II, 1997 16mm colour anamorphic film with optical sound, 4 min Collections: The Art Institute of Chicago, Frac Bretagne, Chaeaugiron
[ 32 ] [plate 10] Tacita Dean Ztráta, 1991/1992 16mm black and white Film transferred from standard 8mm, 3min 30sec
[ 33 ] considers the ‘by chance’ experience of a location that subsequently projects a sense of displacement. In my work, I apply the idea of serendipity by using my actual experience and the creative reaction I have to a place to provide me with a distinct creative urge to produce an image, or work from that encounter.
Quoted in an interview, Dean explains that you do not need to know about the subject’s details, for example the character Crowhurst, to watch and appreciate her film Disappearance at Sea (1996), as the work deals with ‘the genesis of the story’52 [Plate 9]. “The initial experience of the work lies in this minute opacity of images that have motion yet are still, images about which, on the surface of it, we know nothing, and about which, in the artist’s view, nothing in particular needs to be known in advance”.53
Dean uses Andre Bréton’s notion of “‘objective chance’ as external circumstances acting in response to unspoken desires and demands of the human psyche”. Stating she “wants to be in a position to allow the unforeseeable to happen”.54 This suggests that narrative in her work is deceptive, or can cease to exist altogether–that allegory can imply a method of association, relying on the beholder’s collective memory to read, explore and interpret the work.
Dean’s work upholds the distance between the present and an imagined experience. The work Ztrata (1991/2002), meaning ‘to look’ in Czech, is an ephemeral sequence of the action performed by a school teacher of writing a word on a blackboard and subsequently rubbing it out [Plate 10]. The film is ambiguous in its temporality “its position between past and present”, where it “plays literally on the appearance and disappearance of the words ‘presence’ and ‘absence’”.55 In Dean’s work there is a gap between the tangible experience and the alleged situation. She highlights the allegorical or symbolic aspects
52 Dean was quoted by Colin Gleadell in the article “Making it by faking it”, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, February 2, 2001. Royoux, Tacita Dean, p.61 53 ibid. 54 ibid. p.80 55 The work is articulated by Royoux, Tacita Dean, p.64
[ 34 ] in the films she creates: that of time, experience, memory, loss, and place. By doing so she creates a repository of ideas and meanings.56 “It is in the reception of each of Dean’s films that implies an accumulation of impressions, of ‘as ifs’, of evocations”.57
So it can be seen that her works speculate on the way things appear and diminish, of past and present co-existing, especially in her use of film and photography, where there is a play on authenticity, memory, and an invitation for the viewer to complete or invent the narrative.
Simryn Gill
In a similar way to Tacita Dean, Simryn Gill interprets, stretches and re- interprets histories of places and objects. Her work also ascertains an intuitive mode of production and reception. Gill’s imagery proposes an instinctual reading, produced in context to the time and place the work is to be seen as well as considering the cultural and social beliefs of the viewer. Combining photography, text, object archives and personal collections, she explores time, collective identity and the collapse of history. She presents us with a ‘processing of facts’, a cultural knowledge of places she traverses between Australia and Malaysia.
Gill has long been interested in questioning what has been left behind, not only in her photographic work, but in the ‘knick-knacks’ she decontextualises. In doing so she asks “how can this thing from another place make sense here?’ and “how does it form connections to other things?”58 In this way, by facilitating an encounter with displaced objects, she forms a new meaning or understanding of the place, its significance and how it may be re-presented in the present.
56 Royoux in the contextualisation of Dean’s work, discusses Craig Owens’ inventory of techniques used by artists of the second half of the Twentieth Century who explore an allegorical approach to their art making–these include “fragmentation, ruins, the present represented in the form of past reality, site specificity, the freeze frame, accumulation and the logic of the supplement.” (p.61). In his essay “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism”, Craig Owens argues that allegory “has a capacity to rescue from historical oblivion that what which threatens to disappear.” He suggests that the artist fronts as an interpreter, and through the artist’s interpretation, the images becomes something else–the original meaning (of the object or image) is lost, or obscured, when another dimension is added, or supplemented. Through this investigation he illustrates its structure, concluding with the suggestion that “allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery”. OCTOBER, Vol 13, Summer 1980, p.68 57 Royoux. op.cit. p.80 58 Gill is quoted in the catalogue essay by Russel Storer, Simryn Gill, MCA, Sydney and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2008, p.45
[ 35 ] [plate 11] Simryn Gill Garland, 2006 Worn objects collected from beaches in Malaysia, Installation view, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo
[ 36 ] [plate 12] Simryn Gill Standing Still, 2004 Pages from artist’s book
[ 37 ] [plate 13] Simryn Gill Caress, 2007 Graphite rubbings on paper of various typewriters 90 x 60 cm each
[ 38 ] For example, Garland (2006–) is a collection of worn objects and glass pieces found by Gill washed ashore on Malaysian beaches and collected over an extended period of time (since 1993) [Plate 11]. Their exact origin remains uncertain, yet their physical presence is felt and experienced in the context of the gallery. Somewhat like the images from Gill’s Standing still (2000–2003), the objects portrayed have deteriorated due to exposure of sun, wind and sand reminding us of the passing of time [Plate 12]. The object’s presence reiterates the reality of the past.
Standing still pictures various public and private structures from across Malaysia in decay and dilapidation. Her interest rests not only in the social and economic effects on these places, but in what they signify of civilisation, as well as the poetic or aesthetic quality of a ruin affected by the process of time.59 Gill’s interest in Port Dickson’s faux-Tudor estates reflects my own practice of re-visiting and visually exploring similar types of housing in Poland, China and France. The decomposition of these places echos their global economic successes and failures from another time or history.
Gill’s Standing still images of these buildings seem to consider the place as redundant, or something that ‘once was’. My own work Making Traces (2007) brings to mind how photography may reminisce for us [Plates 25–35]. That photographs of these places in Making Traces and Gill’s Standing still become accounts of ‘humanity’ of what is left and replaced in time. Barthes’ claim that photography’s essence is the quality of “that-has-been”, is suggested in these images: that the actual place is no longer what it once was. Where the photographs portray “reality in a past state: at once the past and the real”.60
Gill’s Caress (2007–), a series of frottaged images of typewriters, presents the obsolete object as imaged through time in a different tactile form [Plate 13]. They seem animated and imaginary traces, deliberating on a past state or history as well as referencing the function of the machine. The process of frottage leaves a trace of the object on the paper, signifying its absence. Similar to the intrinsic quality of the photograph, the imprint of nature is left on the surface of the film, forever connecting that image with its now absent subject.
59 Storer, Simryn Gill, p.55 60 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.82
[ 39 ] Gill’s work is layered with metaphors relating to social, political and natural forces that “shape and transform people across generations”.61 Through her obsessive collecting, categorising, and archiving of the everyday, her work evokes a continual search for place. By drawing our attention to places and objects that are inflicted by time, she shows the residue of their passing and their disconnection from an intended use. Consequently, the work reflects her sense of loss or dislocation experienced through traversing between places– Malaysia and Australia. In my own work, like Gill’s Standing still, a search for place is alluded to via the analogy of dispossessed landscapes inflicted by time that realises the memory of place or history.
Peter Bialobrzeski
Peter Bialobrzeski’s photographic explorations of sites through the depiction of what is unused, been abandoned, forgotten and displaced have influenced various facets of my imagery. His series of photographs Transition (2005), depict aspects of the urban landscape that lies on the periphery of 28 cities [Plates 14–17]. The sites seem familiar, photographed in places like Dubai, Hamburg, Kuala Lumpur and New York. Derived from a documentary approach to image making, the systematic presentation of reality informs the viewer of the state of post-modern cities and desolate towns while suggesting a state of flux.
My interest is specifically informed by Bialobrzeski’s visual and aesthetical exploration of the ways a place may define and re-define itself over time. The locations in his pictures are photographed at dusk, a light that hints at “another realm of the transitory and the in-between”.62 The subjects seem isolated and somewhat alienated when lit by this particular form of low intangible light, with it’s muted colour and vacancy. The images appear to examine the phenomenon of a place undergoing transition.
Bialobrzeski’s photographs picture various sites that have become dysfunctional either through building works or abandonment, for example Transition 13: an aged building standing amidst a flat backdrop of sky and snow, perhaps used or
61 Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Simryn Gill, p.7 62 Michael Glasmeier, “The Presentness of the Unpredetermind”, Peter Bialobrzeski: Lost in Transition, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2007
[ 40 ] [plate 14] Peter Bialobrzeski Transition 11, 2005 C-print, 30 x 40 cm
[ 41 ] [plate 15] Peter Bialobrzeski Transition 16, 2005 C-print, 30 x 40 cm
[ 42 ] [plate 16] Peter Bialobrzeski Transition 20, 2005 C-print, 30 x 40 cm
[ 43 ] [plate 17] Peter Bialobrzeski Transition 32, 2005 C-print, 30 x 40 cm
[ 44 ] vacant, it is difficult to tell [Plate 14]. The incandescent light diffuses the reality, evoking an otherworldly time or place. Another, Transition 16, offers up an image of an incomplete concrete tower, wrapped and protected by bamboo mesh in the foreground, appearing superimposed behind a peach coloured fence bordered by a cluster of young trees [Plate 15]. While other images show illuminated, ghostly, high-rise cities emerging from a distant and ephemeral background [Plate 15, 17].
Through the long exposures of his large format plate camera Bialobrzeski achieves an immense stillness in the landscape reminiscent of time passing. Michael Glasmeier proposes in his essay The Presentness of the Unpredetermind, that “the length of time required to view these images stands in complete opposition to the actual time we would spend in the places themselves”.63 The photographs show locations that we may find curious and wish to contemplate or observe, but not necessarily ones that we would like to exist within.
Simon Gregg in his catalogue essay to the exhibition An ideal for living, claims that in the modern ruin “a sense of unfamiliarity, uncanniness and bewilderment converges”.64 Likewise my own work “is situated within a present that is itself ruinous, mining the flux between the ruin and redefinition, while resonating keenly with the Romantic longing for what is missing, and its attempt to supply it”.65 These ‘ruins’66 sit alongside Bialobrzeski’s new metropolis redefining a vision of within and of the landscape.
Bialobrzeski’s work alludes to the dissemination of places, suggesting that the definition of place may be lost within the amplified scale and industrial transformation of an urban city. The site’s ‘psychological distance’, as in Augé’s theory of non-place, may affirm these sites pictured as having developed from supermodernity. The loss of identity and authenticity in these spaces is a result of the past and present breaking the anthropological history of the place, eliminating the relevance of it’s residents and the surrounding cultural context
63 Glasmeier, Peter Bialobrzeski: Lost in Transition 64 Simon Gregg, An Ideal for Living, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne, April/May 2008, p.13 65 Simon Gregg, “Ok with my decay: encounters with chronology”, ARTLINK, Vol 29, No 1, 2009, p.61 66 Glasmeier references the use of the ruin as a subject of art in the early period Mannerism and Romanticism, where painters would attempt to ‘imbue transitory spaces and immortalize them’ in images. op.cit.
[ 45 ] and character. Augé suggests that places are no longer what they were, their identity is dissolved, that as we shift (through globalisation) we lose the strength of our cultural identity.
Neorealist film
Neorealism expressed the changing psyche of Italians in post-war Europe. The genre identified a historical reality as well as articulating ways of understanding the human condition. In a dramatic narrative of protagonists and antagonists, events are lived out in the story, enabling the viewer to relate to the real world outside the cinema. The situations seem familiar, relaying things that the viewer already believes or recognises to be true.
Intentionally using a raw, documentary visual style Neorealist cinema exemplified a nostalgic and optimistic way of seeing the world. Although Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist film, Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) (1948), is infused with sadness it manages to portray and possess an optimism towards life [Plate 18]. Amidst a fragmented, post war reality the poverty stricken village is presented with romantic hope. Reflecting the visual style of Neorealism my images reference that same sense of loss and the tragedy rendered in their representation of everyday life. Similarly the stylistic, cinematic approach and use of actual locations (most commonly exterior spaces or landscapes) are used to invoke a deeper association with the drama so as to create a nostalgia for the situation presented.
The layered narratives in Neorealist cinema become a referent to the facts, or realities the films explored67. In Ladri di biciclette, the plot of the storyline is layered with multiple meanings and narratives that contemplate the human
67 Christopher Wagstaff points out an interesting connection between the index and the referent, experienced by us in a film: “Indexical signs ‘make reference’ because of a link between cause (the referent) and effect (the sign). We distinguish between our direct experience of the referent and of it’s indexical sign, because we think of signs as referring to their referents in the absence of the referent. By ‘absence’ we do not mean that it never existed, but rather that it was not directly and sensorially experienced by us. …Rather than ‘pointing us towards’ the referent (as might the symbols of a novel), the cinematic sign appears to deliver to us the sensory stimuli generated by the referent itself.” The photographic process has also been called by many critics to bear the indexical sign through the process of the light reflecting off the object and by the light sensitive chemicals leaving its trace on the paper. Assumingly a part of the real event (object) is created and becomes a referent to the event. The layered narratives in Neorealist cinema become a referent to the facts, or realities the films explore. Italian Neorealist Cinema: an aesthetic approach, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, c2007, p.51
[ 46 ] [plate 18] Vittorio De Sica The Bicycle Thief, 1948 Film stills
[ 47 ] condition, stress, vulnerability and solitude68. The film can be seen as a realist rendition of post-war poverty and bad luck, as well as having a sentimental appeal to the viewer’s emotional identification with the psychological condition of the protagonist. Nevertheless, in the narrative there seems to be traces of several layers and meanings, pointing in numerous directions where logical (or traditional) connections to narrative conventionally disappear.69 Neorealism heralded the technique of constructing films through fragments.
The fragmentary approach to the conventional narrative in cinema influenced a second generation of documentary photographers. In particular Robert Frank’s lack of narrative in his seminal work The Americans, published in 1959, established a new way of making and viewing images, challenging the notion of the authenticity of the photographic rhetoric that existed before the war.
Unlike the fragmented reality in Neorealism, photographic images elucidate a broken narrative collectively denying any unity of the time or place. Although my work is not documentary, I still choose to depict a fragmented reality conveyed through the lack of narrative and temporal connection between my images. I do this to reveal a longing for what is no longer there, a nostalgia and optimism for a sense of place. As well, my own photographic work reflects a poetic sensibility by it’s evocation of that sense of loss or longing for where we have never been or may never experience.
68 The use of references in realism is discussed in depth by Wagstaff. Italian Neorealist Cinema: an aesthetic approach, p.53 69 de Sica’s Ladri di biciclette and its lines of narrative are discussed by Wagstaff. ibid. p.321
[ 48 ] Part 2: Projects
In Part Two I clarify my process of making work, where the site and my experience are intrinsically linked. I consider the artists I discuss in Part One, and identify how their work influences my practice. I refer to my creative inquiry introduced in the speculative framework to both my past works, and those that I have produced over the past two and a half years specifically for my MFA.
Site and Serendipity
I became aware of a desire for what once was or what we may feel nostalgic about, in another time or place, when I visited the small Italian town of Palena. The first Sunday after August 15, in the holiday season, is the day of their Patron Saint Falco, a monk from the 11th century who had the power to heal the possessed and had lived in the valley. For this celebration many great- grandchildren come back to the village and join in the parade of local people, for the Feast of San Falco, marching down the eight-hundred year old street. Those who return, year after year, from their new homes abroad, are reminded of their heritage, reminded also that in the suburbs of Canada, Australia and the United States their cultural traditions do not hold the same charm nor are they valued as dearly as in this town.
For me, the serendipitous discovery of a significant site engenders an immediate response. Lucy Lippard refers to the spontaneous attraction to place, and how it “is really an emotional response to the landscape, which is place at distance, visual rather than sensual, seen rather than felt in all its affective power. Even in places we’ve never seen before, human lives can eerily bubble up from beneath the ground and haunt us”.70 I am provoked by my own collisions with chance, when I encounter a site that invokes a silence and a timelessness that replicates the present and past simultaneously.
How little of our urban landscape remains symbolic with a sense of place diminishing under the modern act of change. I enjoy the act of looking and visualising, finding a fragment from the past and imagining what it may have
70 Lippard, The lure of the local: senses of place in a multicentered society, p.8
[ 49 ] meant; question it’s intent or function–all the possibilities or impossibilities that may drift by, calling up a vision or memory of a place. I am drawn to sites that remind me of what our culture no longer presents today.
I use the term ‘site’ for the purpose of addressing a ‘location’ that references the position of a building or place, or indicates where something is situated. I also refer to ‘location’ as a generic term to identify a place or residence. I use both these terms to acknowledge the process of my approach to subjects/ sites that I photograph. Specifically my concern is with how these sites evoke a physical place of belonging or alternatively imply a space of psychological displacement.
Using the medium of photography I explore a site through my own experience and intervention within the space. My imagery visually investigates how an empty site may invoke a longing for a place: how sites of redundant urban landscape, including dilapidated buildings, uncanny structures out of context or deserted homes, evoke an interstitial space; how images void of human presence become distant but at the same time are familiar and how images can provoke us to feel a longing for what is no longer there.
I am drawn to the natural and built environment by the experience of everyday life. The work I create develops through travel and a response to the location I am in, the surrounds and its people. I am interested in the idea of serendipity, of discovering sites by chance, and being able to respond to them in the moment and I suppose that is why I am drawn to the medium of photography.
The two bodies of work discussed below, Home(land) and Making Mirrors produced in 2006, are not part of my MFA, however, they do give a context or background to the current direction and concerns of my research and creative vision.
Home(land)
In 2006 I visited Japan for the second time. I spent several days in the town of Hakone, an hour from central Tokyo and known for its Onsen (hot springs). My daily routine consisted of moving between my hotel and one of the many local hot spring resorts. Each day presented a new and hedonistic challenge of deciding which Onsen to visit, how long to stay or what temperatures to choose.
[ 50 ] The remaining time I spent exploring this curious town, where the architecture and urban fabric seemed mysterious and naturally foreign.
There was a bus stop just near my hotel, and although I walked passed it daily, it took some time before I noticed, through the thick foliage to the left of the bench, an opening that exposed a decrepit and abandoned swimming pool. A fence framed the property and within it was a vast cemented hole in the ground, overgrown by weed and covered with vine and dirt. The structure appeared somehow vulnerable amidst the dark, looming pines that provided a canopy of shelter.
My immediate interest in the site rested in the sign of historical activity, the previously possessed colour and life where now only lingered a scant trace. I decided to return with my camera to photograph the locale, jumping the fence just behind the bus stop, a not so graceful action and witnessed by a few by-standers waiting for the bus. Even the act of curiously looking over the concealed fence felt like a dubious action, the fence signifying the psychological boundary of implied apathy to what had become a redundant and neglected site. An indicator of a forgotten but not too distant past. Time had stood still, whilst all around the site life continued–the tall foliage beckoning at what it had superseded and witnessed.
Home(land) (2006), comprises three photo mural wallpapers, depicting various forms of landscape that engage with the viewer’s conscious reality [Plates 19– 21]. The central image is of the site I photographed in Japan. The accompanying pictures were made during similarly profound experiences–from a footbridge in Barcelona and whilst dangling in a ski lift at the Abruzzi mountains in Palena, Italy. The black and white images ostensibly offer familiar locations but when placed together become incongruent and vague. Their aesthetic lingers somewhere between candid pictures, typical postcard vistas, film stills or slides from a non-specific period. By playing with the scale of what one may perceive and know from the appearance of a place, the magnitude of the images, scaling three meters across by two meters high, with their dominating spatial presence evoke a phenomenological quality. The subject matter of the locations, derived as it is from the ordinary or everyday, are taken with a flat, sharp and matter-of- fact camera perspective referencing a documentary style. The work attempts to connect the non-spectacular reality of the location with the limitless margins of the imagination.
[ 51 ] [plate 19] Izabela Pluta Home(land) #1, 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 200 x 300 cm
[ 52 ] [plate 20] Izabela Pluta Home(land) #2, 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 200 x 300 cm each
[ 53 ] [plate 21] Izabela Pluta Home(land) #3, 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 200 x 300 cm each
[ 54 ] Alluding to a nostalgic memory of a landscape, the fragmented sequence of images proposes a non-specific place or experience with the scenic views of vast landscapes invoking a temporal duration. Margaret Olin, uses the term ‘performative index’, to illustrate the indexical power of the image in relation to the photograph and it’s beholder, rather than the instinctive relationship between the photograph and it’s subject.71 My photo mural imagery plays with the influence of the imagination on the viewer’s connection to the image rather than on the indexical nature of the photograph itself.
Referencing Dean’s work Floh (2001), where the de-contextualisation of found images lacks a narrative or system but triggers a memory from the people viewing the work, rather than expressing something about the people within the work.72 The ‘beholder’ brings their own life experience and social position to focus on or distort the reading of the image.
Home(land) explores the way a place may be evoked or recalled, through the materiality and physicality of a photo mural. These landscapes are reminiscent of the stereotypical scenic wallpapers seen in affluent French homes after the Revolution of the late eighteenth century.73 I use it here to reference the possibility of imagining a world somewhere else through the view of a panoramic vista. A journey that is said to be provided by the subject matter through its long association with deception and illusion.74
Our cultures seem ever more transient, moving back and forth between places with the notion of home becoming more distant and sometimes absent. Lippard asserts that “since our sense of identity is fundamentally tied to places and the histories they embody, the uprooting of our lives from specific local cultures and places–through voluntary migrations and forced movements–has contributed to the waning of our abilities to locate ourselves”.75 The work examines this state
71 Margaret Olin argues the role of identification, “Touching photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ identification”, REPRESENTATIONS, No. 80, Autumn 2002, pp.114–115 72 Godfrey, OCTOBER, p.119 73 In the Western world, the availability of ‘scenic’ wallpapers was made first by the French, and marked social distinction. As perhaps a reaction to challenge the English market of flocked papers, the scenes were still printed from wood bocks, but so detailed that they gave an illusion of a painted landscape. They were printed on up to 30 individual lengths to be hung around a room. Saunders, Wallpaper in Interior Decoration, p.89 74 ibid. p. 90 75 Lippard’s The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicultural Society is discussed by Kwon, One place after another, p.158
[ 55 ] [plate 22] Izabela Pluta Home(land) #2, 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 352 x 480 cm Installation view, Newcastle Region Gallery, Newcastle
[ 56 ] [plate 23] Izabela Pluta Home(land), 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 200 x 900 cm Installation view, Westspace, Melbourne
[ 57 ] of flux: the attachment and nostalgia for the past, and how it manifests itself through physical places in the present.
In this work, I am concerned with how a sense of history can be revealed in a series of landscapes that have in each scenario endured time. The subject of the images (vacant vistas) in the photo mural installation suggests a longing of a person for another place, a desire to imagine themselves somewhere else. Their materiality alludes to the physical manifestation of place–making home through associations of another in order to form a new sense of belonging. According to Papastergiadis we manifest our culture in every place we live. Photo murals are one example of the way a sense of place was recreated in Australia by migrants adopting a similar aesthetic to what they grew up with in their European homeland. This intervention forms a new aesthetic, operating as constant reminder of their cultural history with a sense of place achieved through a nostalgic recreation of that home.
Home(land) implies a physical reality and the imagined or remembered moment: contemplating a desire to ease the reality of a psychological space that one may be in, through the constructed photo mural. The photo murals are utilised for the way they reference the permanence of establishing a ‘home’ and their ability to convey a façade, of reality or fiction within a place. Reflecting the idea that actual experience and imagination come together and bring to mind how memory and image are embodied through the papiers-peints paysages76. If our environments can provide comfort, security and belonging, then creating places for ourselves where we can be as we always were seems to be a way of relieving the distress of dislocation.
My approach to the ‘ordinary’ nature of the subject matter and the rough, black and white visual style of Home(land) references the ways the everyday was aesthetically rendered by the Neorealist filmmakers. I have applied a similar tonal quality, emphasised the film grain by using fast film and adopted a cinematic scale in the installation of the photo murals [Plates 22, 23].
76 The French term “papiers-peints paysages“ refers to ‘scenic’, ‘panoramic’ or ‘landscape’ wallpapers. Saunders, Wallpaper in Interior Decoration, p.89
[ 58 ] The lack of narrative and loose episodic structure of Neorealist film is alluded to by the three fragmented images hinting at a layered reality that could have multiple meanings. The installation and imagery infer a longing for what is no longer there, a nostalgia and optimism for a sense of place.
Making Mirrors
“An entire past comes to dwell in a new house”.77
In early 2006 I briefly lived on the island of Mauritius with a Hindi family. My time was spent encountering various parts of the two thousand square km island comprising an archipelago with its neighbor Rodriguez. My fascination with the Creole culture grew from the fact that Mauritus was made up of a mix of so many distinct cultures.
The Island of Mauritius was initially visited by Portuguese sailors in the 16th Century, however it was the Dutch who sought to colonise it only to abandon the island a few decades later. Subsequently, it was colonised by France, then during the Napoleonic Wars Britain took control of the Island. It wasn’t until 1968 that Mauritius gained independence and became a republic within the Commonwealth. The country’s population is currently comprised of descendants mainly from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Madagascar, France, Great Britain and China.
I had glimpsed this particular dwelling from the road several times whilst driving [see Plate 24]. With each sighting I became more fascinated by the complexity of cultural signs inherent in the building. The design seemed western. Enveloped by luscious greenery from typically tropical climates, the house was fully constructed with the exception of some parts of the roof. The second storey had no walls but support pillars extending to the sky, allowing for a further floor to eventually be added when the inhabitant’s offspring married and a new family joined the one below. The roof was a platform supporting several concrete sculptures, most commonly associated with an Italian tradition of architectural decoration and ornament. Apart from a few missing windows and cosmetic finishes, the house seemed complete and occupied. It’s intriguing
77 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.5
[ 59 ] characteristics revealing a history of it’s occupants, offering an optimistic future for a home that seemed “no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived”.78 This serendipitous encounter relates to the work Making Mirrors (2006) [Plates 24, 25].
Making Mirrors is composed of a photographic rendition of this dwelling: the iconic setting of a luscious and tranquil landscape surrounding a private home. The premise of this work is again based on early photo murals; providing an illusion of a spectacular picture window vista inhabiting a suburban living room. The image comprises a multi-paneled photograph (eight, one meter panels which overlap to form a seamless image) wallpapered directly onto the gallery wall. The material reality that a photo mural wallpaper historically provided–the nostalgia for a better life, or a past one–was expressed by the “escapist fantasy, the desire to alleviate the prosaic of the home and domestic routines….it bespoke a yearning for the part of an urban class for a country life, for a view onto lakes and hills instead of brick walls, factories and monotonous streets…” all this was “embodied in an illusionist picture”.79
My interest in locating the photo mural within a gallery context is for two reasons: it’s material form alludes to the possibility of transposing oneself from the domestic environment to somewhere else while a careful selection of image allows for the contemplation of a site that is difficult to locate–a place that is universal, may be situated anywhere and seems familiar yet foreign. In Making Mirrors the photo mural’s traditional depiction of an exotic and appealing landscape is replaced by an image of a bleak dwelling. The charming large- scale fantasy usually depicted in the home via the photo mural is replaced in the gallery with the depiction of a desolate site–a site that evokes disconnection from a place, rather than reminiscent of it. This work was installed in an exhibition at Artspace, Wooloomooloo in March 2006.
Making Mirrors operates on a number of levels: as a complex sign of a cultural framework, a family home set within the Island of Mauritius; as a representation of occupying a space and making it one’s own; and as a reference to the historical and psychological uses of photo mural. My concern here is how one
78 A quote from John Berger in Papastergiadis, Dialogues in Diasporas, p.5 79 Saunders, Wallpaper in Interior Decoration, p.97
[ 60 ] [plate 24] Izabela Pluta Making Mirrors, 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 300 x 850cm Installation view, Artspace, Sydney
[ 61 ] [plate 25] Izabela Pluta Making Mirrors, 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 300 x 850cm Installation view, Artspace, Sydney
[ 62 ] “subjectively constructs spaces”80 through movement, migration and adaptation; how the physical place and the psychic space can be interwoven.
“...at times dreams go back so far into an unidentified, dateless past that clear memories of our childhood home appear to be detached from us… we reach a point where we begin to doubt that we ever lived where we lived. Our past is situated elsewhere, and both time and place are impregnated with a sense of unreality”.81
My preoccupation is with the capacity of architecture and urban landscapes to hold layers of history and with dwellings that become artifacts of different cultures and time. The architectural quality may not be that of a great building, but merely a word to describe the space from within a specific cultural framework. Making Mirrors also considers my own experience of the site and the personal association and memories I have of photo murals from my grandmother’s house. I have used the medium to contemplate and explore the notion of relocation and migration.
…to be drifting
With reference to the discussion of place, in its physical and psychological capacity in Part One, I will now demonstrate how my practice explores and reflects on these interests. I will discuss three bodies of work that were developed during the course of my MFA Making Traces (2007), in (and against) time (2009) and à la dérive (2009). in (and against) time and à la dérive were undertaken during a residency at the Cité International des Arts in Paris in 2008.
80 The physicality of my work is discussed succinctly in a catalogue essay by Ashley Whamond “Making mirrors and breaking walls”, ARTSPACE PROJECTS, 2006, p.13 81 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.58
[ 63 ] Making Traces
Photography conjures up “that which is already inside us–the memory of a dream which was once reality”.82
Making Traces (2007) evolved from a body of work consisting of various photographic images collected from different places I have lived and experienced [Plates 26–35]. They were taken at intervals, months or even years apart, in locations that appeared, at the time, to evoke a disconnection from the world. The images were shot in Spain, Poland, Australia, Japan and Thailand. Whilst reviewing these photographs from my archive, after some time had passed, I noticed that the understood context and association to the actual locations pictured were now lost to me. Similar to the lack of emotional connection we have to photographic portraits of unrecognised relatives within the family archive, each image had become more random and disconnected from the reality from whence it came.
The attraction for me was the ‘emotional distance’ I felt, and how I would construct a body of work based on my personal disconnection. I contemplated Auge’s idea of a non-place enacting solitude through the lack of it’s connection to a specific place. I also reflected on how my relationship to these places I photographed and experienced through movement and travel had shifted: a hillside featuring an abandoned ski lift; an aerial view of thick bush land unmarked by humanity; an awkward chunk of stone permeating the side of a brick building; a classical column marked with a single act of graffiti; the facade of a housing block partially concealed by vines; two curious cooling fans residing in a rocky landscape; the abandoned interior of a decrepit hotel marked with stains; a forest of hops climbing vertically; a vast football field amidst overgrown foliage with a sandy foreground; and newspaper wrapped parcels of fish lying on the sand. These images had become fleeting observations, glimpses “in which neither identity, nor relations, nor history really made any sense”83 and offered only a simple ‘melancholy pleasure’. The photographs disclose the banal, ordinary spaces or objects that surround us, conveying a disconnection between the places we inhabit and the spaces we experience. They explore the idea that
82 Brougher describes Sugimoto’s use of photographic language, Hiroshi Sugimoto, p.136 83 Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, p.87
[ 64 ] [plate 26] Izabela Pluta Making Traces #1, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[ 65 ] [plate 27] Izabela Pluta Making Traces #2, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[ 66 ] [plate 28] Izabela Pluta Making Traces #3, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 100 cm
[ 67 ] [plate 29] Izabela Pluta Making Traces #4, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[ 68 ] [plate 30] Izabela Pluta Making Traces #5, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[ 69 ] [plate 31] Izabela Pluta Making Traces #6, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 100 cm
[ 70 ] [plate 32] Izabela Pluta Making Traces #7, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[ 71 ] [plate 33] Izabela Pluta Making Traces #8, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 100 cm
[ 72 ] [plate 34] Izabela Pluta Making Traces #9, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[ 73 ] [plate 35] Izabela Pluta Making Traces #10, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[ 74 ] [plate 36] Izabela Pluta Making Traces, 2007 Installation view, Inflight Art, Hobart 100 x 100 cm or 100 x 160 cm each, series of 10 photographs
[ 75 ] landscape only hints at the actual place, prompting a search for more definitive marks of distinction or familiarity.
Evidence of time passing was a significant attraction for me in these various locations–the notion of memory, instilled in a photograph of an nondescript building, public space or closed interior. They represent what has been abandoned in these built reminders of time, uncovering a trace of history revealed in an architectural landscape.
Similar to my own work, Candida Höfer’s images are suffused with traces of the people who inhabit the places she photographs [Plate 37]. They hint at the everyday, at the “sediments that have settled there over time in which histories and stories can be read”.84 Her work intersects with an almost ethnographic interest in cultural manifestations that exist in common places, a precise documentation of the space where a sense of wonder appears.85 In some cases, the image possesses a sense of loss for the place it represents, it reiterates solitude, an image empty of the people and activity which situate that locale within the world.
My methodology as an image maker, in Making Traces, where I explore a disconnected reality through universal sites and my personal experiences of them has similarities with that of Tacita Dean. Unlike Dean however, who connects and contemplates specific stories she learns of and experiences, I am more concerned with the non-specific relationship between various sites, and the connection that may result from a particular reading or evocation of that physical place or psychological space. My process incorporates the desire to connect with a non-specific location, a need to form a sense of belonging to a place that, perhaps, exists in all of us.
As with the exhibition In hindsight the narrative may/may not have been as expected86, at Inflight Art, Hobart in 2007, Making Traces was shown in a sequential format. The 10 photographs, including the abandoned ski lift and the interior of a decrepit hotel, were hung side by side, with varying sized gaps separating each photograph [Plate 36]. The spacing alluding to those moments in time that
84 Gloria Moure, Architecture without Shadow, Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona, c2000, p.61 85 ibid. 86 An exhibition curated by Diana Robson, including artist Todd McMillan and me, at artist run space Inflight Art in Hobart, Tasmania
[ 76 ] [plate 37] Candida Höfer Collegium Helveticum ETH Zurich, 2005 C-print 72 1/2 x 81 1/4 in.
[ 77 ] can be drawn out, extended and then collapsed. These images and their spacing direct the viewer’s awareness to seemingly distant narratives or temporal fragments that intervene with the real (place) and the fictional (imagination).
Similar to Susan Stewart’s suggestion that the postcard creates a nostalgic illusion, the invented narrative of Making Traces evokes a vague recognition and nostalgic reminiscence of the site represented. The reading of the photographs tempt a curiosity and contemplation by their inference to places that seem to exist in our memory–of someplace we have been or experienced or where we desire to be. By longing to be somewhere else, we float in a kind of ‘limbo’, lost ‘in-between’ places, needing to make sense of the world and our place within it. Thus bringing about a sense of dislocation, a distancing from our place of home…and so we drift.87
“To drift is to be carried along by currents of water or air, or by the force of circumstance”.88
In 2008 I undertook a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. I approached the city of Paris based on my creative concerns around place and experience (through migration). I started looking for locations to explore where the notion of an ‘in-between space’ is evoked by a landscape: one that for me possesses signs of cultural dislocation, loss and longing.
In contemporary Parisian life, I observed how increasingly social segregation of different cultural identities was negotiated through urban division. The lower
87 Although it is not of specific interest to my work, I acknowledge Guy Debord and Situationist thinking that began in Paris in the early 1950’s––in particular his notion of the dérive relating to movement within a geographical environment and it’s effect on human behaviour and emotion: psychogeography. Where “in a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” (Guy Debord, “Les Lèvres Nues #9”, THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL TEXT LIBRARY, http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314). There is an analogy here of the way I approach the landscape, referencing travel and migration. The significance of Paris to my recent work, especially the suburbs, is shared by Chombart de Lauwe in his study Paris et l’agglomération parisienne (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) where he notes that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.”(Debord, “Les Lèvres Nues #9”). Debord’s “drifting” perceives axes of passage, arrivals and departures, measuring distances that may not be physical: abstract experiments of the dérive that probe ideas regarding the changing urban landscape. The Situationists devoted themselves to drifting through the city looking for the city’s psychogeography. Tom McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International: texts and documents, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, c2002, p.4 88 The 12th definition from the Concise Macquarie Dictionary, Doubleday, Australia, 1986, p.373
[ 78 ] [plate 38] Izabela Pluta Untitled (defining Paris), 2009 block print from lino, 14 x 20 cm
[ 79 ] socio-economic classes were being pushed outwards to the periphery of the city. The growing fragmentation of metropolitan society, as advanced by Augé, deemed Paris a particularly relevant location where this process was visible in the urban landscape and social structures within the city and its edges.
A fortified wall was built to enclose Paris and completed in 1211 during the reign of King Philip II Augustus of France. The defining edge of the city’s perimeter, however, fluctuated many times until the 19th century. Within the fortified wall the city was arranged into 12 arrondissements (districts) until 1860 when Paris was again extended into the surrounding territory to form 20 arrondissements. The arrondissements are currently arranged in numerical order radiating out in a clockwise spiral from the Palais Royal on the River Seine. A motorway known as the Périphérique encircles the city at the edge of the arrondissements, and separates Paris from it’s outer suburbs.89 [Plate 38]
Over the centuries, the urban amenity of the city of Paris has been altered considerably by the many changes of rulers, politicians, urban designers and architects resulting in a variety of spatial typologies and a complex layering of architectural styles. With the influx of immigrants post WWII the urban space of Paris also developed rapidly into a site of changing social and cultural topography. Particularly in the outer suburbs (les banlieues), where the settlement of migrants is ample, the urban fabric resonates with the character of a different culture and the construction of new spaces. The periphery of Paris has now become even more diffused and animated, no longer a static circle.
Conceived as a Utopian community by the American architect Emile Aillaud, the suburb of Grigny-la-Grande Borne situated south of Paris, has been described as the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ of France. Built between 1967 and 1971, to help deal with the increased population, the site comprises a triangle of two or three storied buildings with pedestrian lanes curving between the coloured and curved structures. Aillaud’s idea was to create a d=ormitory town that would become a ‘city of the children’. Included are public spaces where the elderly can ‘take the afternoon sun’ and where children can play. In the centre of the estate’s apartments is an immense park with green lawns, daisies and trees–giving the space a contrived university campus subtext [Plate 39].
89 Philippe Simmon, Paris Visite Guidee: Architecture, Urbanism, History and Actuality, A & J Picard, Paris, 2007
[ 80 ] In 2008 the estate had 25,000 inhabitants, wedged in a triangular land mass between the A6 motorway, a trunk road and an industrial park. Grigny is an entry point to migrants arriving from Africa. Unemployment is twice as high as the other regions with incomes lower by half than the national average. Alongside the poverty, precariousness and cultural rupture the estate has had an enormous social impact on greater Paris.
The ‘designed’ Utopia of Grande Borne has over time been transformed into a sedentary nightmare. Deliverymen do not come, doctors refuse visits and according to the police, the zone is a ‘hinged plate’ for the traffic of narcotics transported along the A6 motorway.90 Grigny-la-Grande Borne was the site of riots in 2005, and again in March 2008, one month before I took up residence in the Cité studio in Paris.
During my residency, I decided to investigate the housing estates in Grigny- la-Grande Borne and the other outer Parisian suburbs of les Courtillières (Pantin), and Saint-Christophe (Cergy-Pontoise). These particular areas have become representative of the distinct difference between the contained centre of Paris and it’s chaotic fringe. The people who inhabit the suburbs beyond the Périphérique are less culturally homogeneous because of high unemployment, their low income status and those who ‘differ’ from the majority, by either their culture or ethnic origin.
The people living outside the Paris Périphérique are no longer who they once were. They do not live in “places of memory”91. The terrain that encompasses their existence in the everyday world does not reflect a history, let alone an anthropological place–one that holds their defining traditions and cultural context.
In my third week at the studio I took a train ride on the RER, beyond the reach of the metro system, to Grigny-la-Grande Borne in the south of Paris92. The suburban train line provides a journey that diminishes our romantic notion of the inner city. On the periphery, past the pretty narrow streets of stone a vast industrial skyline emerges from the myriad train tracks that venture into
90 Gathered from an article by Luc Bronner, “Grigny: the emergency state”, LE MODE.FR, (26 Apr. 2008) 91 Augé mentions Pierre Nora, and the antithesis of ‘the places of memory’, Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, p.55 92 The RER is the Regional Express Rail Network that extends beyond the periphery of Paris.
[ 81 ] [plate 39] Grigny la Grande Borne marked with ‘A’ courtesy Google Maps
[ 82 ] countless directions. Further down the track, the geography exhibits traces of public housing towers of all shapes and sizes. Mostly rearing starkly out of the level horizon of typical French houses of four story apartments–their architectural aesthetic, strangely seems to blend, and in their own way subscribe to a ‘Frenchness’ we have come to expect.
When leaving the Grigny centre, through the exit closest to the housing cluster at the base of the station, I was immediately struck by the vast open space, grey bleakness and a shopping mall across the street. Apart from only a single sign indicating its function, the mall could have been a storage facility for a factory, clad in metal sheets of nondescript colour or style. I had to remind myself, that according to Google maps, I was only 28 minutes from the 1st arrondissement. [Plate 39]
While waiting to catch a bus to the Grande Borne estate, I simultaneously felt the cold and noticed an afro-Caribbean woman carrying a small child pass in front of me. She wore a traditional yellow and purple floral gown that exposed her skin at the shoulder. Surprising and beautiful and looking as if she belonged, the woman crossed the street towards the flats with a confident stride. Against the backdrop of beige and grey turf, building and sky I was unprepared for her vibrant presence. It was an unexpected beginning.
As the bus drew near Grande Borne I could see it’s towers boldly arising from the horizon. However, on disembarking I remember being disappointed at their scale. The estate buildings created a triangle facing inwards, forming a wall around itself. Entering the complex felt like being surrounded by another world. The simplicity of the buildings’ forms were impressive–only three stories high–with repetitious brick patchwork, distinctive cladding, concrete and a chronic state of deterioration. As I moved through the complex I began to lose orientation as each building snaked around the other, a perfect yet random arrangement. The walkways inside the triangle were typically devoid of life. I rarely saw people walking around and seldom met anyone who lived there.
Walking through the estate felt like being on an empty stage set. There was no obvious activity, no traversing of people as seen in even the furthest northern suburbs within the Paris Périphérique. Some entrances to the dwellings were fortified, concealed by plaster floating within a white, uneven rectangle. The
[ 83 ] permanent quality of the plaster seemed sculptural, symbolically representing a completion or conclusion. The public spaces, although large, were forbidding, and the repetition of the buildings had a labyrinth like quality. There were no shops (the centre was near the RER), no market, no convenience store, no bars or news stands. Every so often, the spaces between the buildings would reveal an enormous field reiterating the overwhelming vastness of the site, hostile architecture, and the absence of people. Now and again, through the silence, I would hear voices drifting through the open windows from inside the apartments. It was a nice interruption to the solemn landscape. I felt aware of life existing somewhere inside these buildings amplifying the difference between inside and outside.
A conclusion to this site is impossible, my interest still lingers: in the unused architecture of the space and in the physical and emotional complexity of the landscape.
The work that I created for my MFA is a response to this site and comprises two exhibitions: in (and against) time and à la dérive. The images, or studies convey the ideology shaped by these landscapes and are loaded with the contradictory idiosyncrasies and paradigms of contemporary Paris. in (and against) time in (and against) time consists of silver gelatin photographs, a found postcard, and a photo mural. This work was exhibited in a solo show at Canberra Contemporary Art Space in February 2009. [Plate 40]
The site in the photo mural Untitled (2009) has its location concealed but it alludes to a familiar (yet simultaneously foreign) location: one that we have perhaps visited, or identify as resembling housing of its kind [Plate 41, 42]. The repetitiously woven buildings limit the gaze into an open landscape. The light is bleak and flat, the sky over cast, there are no marks of distinction in the buildings, and the site is empty of people. It seems that the actual place bears no sense of identity, a result of the homogenisation of the architectural fabric. This single image was taken at Grigny-la-Grande Borne. I took many 35mm frames at the site, however, I felt there was no need to include other
[ 84 ] [plate 40] Izabela Pluta in (and against) time Untitled, 2009, installed photo mural on adshell paper, 212 x 310cm Untitled #1-5, 2009, 5 silver gelatin photographs, 32 x 40 cm each Chamonix Mont-Blanc, found postcard Maps, 2009, pencil wall drawings, dimensions variable Installation view, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, 2009
[ 85 ] photographs of that location in the exhibition as this particular image appeared to encapsulated my experience.
The accompanying series of black and white silver gelatin prints depict various sites including: an ambiguously collapsed floating island skinned with sprouting foliage: a cluster of what seemed to be bee hives resembling a micro city sprawled beneath a massive tree and an awkwardly balanced football post within a picturesque field alongside an uneven horizon. These unspecified and quotidian sites, with their lack of human presence, allude to a suspension of time and reality offering only fragmentary glimpses into seemingly distant narratives. [Plates 43–48]
I chose to work in black and white for several reasons: the monochrome photograph printed on warm toned fibre based paper offers a beautiful range of tones giving greater detail in the shadows and the highlights; the restricted palette imbued the scene with a melancholy disconnected edge, whereas colour through its descriptive qualities, would have suggested a real presence in the world. The lack of colour allowed the images to occupy an imaginary space, yet simultaneously allude to the reality signified by the photographic document.
A miniature postcard of Chamonix Mont-Blanc, found at a flea market in Paris, is exhibited alongside the photographs as a vehicle to intrigue and generate curiosity [Plate 49]. in (and against) time explores the reality of a place (the actual photographed site) and the sense that a remembrances of that locale exists somewhere else (in the postcard). The work examines the possibility of our desires being reminiscent of another time, place or experience. By authenticating a past and querying the present my use of these two mediums references Stewart’s notion of the ‘memory image’.
Like Simryn Gill, I have used drawings and found ephemera to reflect on what has been left behind and photography to question our emotional responses to history and places. As overtly as Gill, in her series Standing still, I depict structures and sites in various states of decay and dilapidation. My interest is in their allegorical reflection (on an experience) and their intuitive symbolism. The visual language of photography signifies ‘that-has-been’ quality of the past and operates as an effective instrument for reminiscence.
[ 86 ] [plate 41] Izabela Pluta from the exhibition in (and against) time, 2009 Untitled, 2009 Photo mural on adshell paper, 212 x 310 cm
[ 87 ] [plate 42] Izabela Pluta from the exhibition in (and against) time Untitled, 2009, installed photo mural on adshell paper, 212 x 310cm Installation view, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, 2009
[ 88 ] [plate 43] Izabela Pluta from the exhibition in (and against) time Untitled #1-5, 2009, 5 silver gelatin photographs, 32 x 40 cm each
[ 89 ] [plate 44] Izabela Pluta Untitled #1, 2009, silver gelatin photograph, 32 x 40 cm
[ 90 ] [plate 45] Izabela Pluta Untitled #2, 2009, silver gelatin photograph, 32 x 40 cm
[ 91 ] [plate 46] Izabela Pluta Untitled #3, 2009, silver gelatin photograph, 32 x 40 cm
[ 92 ] [plate 47] Izabela Pluta Untitled #4, 2009, silver gelatin photograph, 32 x 40 cm
[ 93 ] [plate 48] Izabela Pluta Untitled #5, 2009, silver gelatin photograph, 32 x 40 cm
[ 94 ] [plate 49] Izabela Pluta Chamonix Mont-Blanc, 2009 found postcard 6 x 9 cm
[ 95 ] à la dérive
Native French speakers when asked to define à la dérive tend to equivocate: “well… it is like you are on a ship and the ship is off course…. or there has been an accident and you must go on a smaller boat… or you are stuck on the ship, you can not go back, or forward…” I appropriated the French term à la dérive (to drift) for the title of this project for a number of reasons; firstly the work was conceived and produced during my residency in Paris; secondly this elusive phrase seemed the perfect analogy for the conceptual and theoretical concerns of my work (for example, of being between one place and another, of old home and new; of being in drift and not being able to reach one’s destination; of being in a psychological space, or an empty space).
The exhibition of à la dérive at Mop Projects, Sydney in May 2009, comprises a series of colour lambda and black and white silver gelatin photographic prints, photo murals, collected objects (postcards), wall drawings and lino-cut block prints [Plates 57–61]. I have utilised these different mediums, which relate to and overlap each other in tradition, function and materiality, specifically to connote some of my theoretical interests. For example, a photographic landscape juxtaposed beside a traced wall drawing of a town planning map, the landscape alluding to a site, meanwhile the map referring to plans made for a place, or giving directions to one; a found postcard in conjunction with a photo mural, positioned next to a series of lino-cut block prints depicting the step-by-step process of constructing a paper house. Both the postcard and mural provide a reality and an imitative description of place while suggesting a nostalgic vision of one’s experience, as I have explored in Part One.
The photographic works in à la dérive, as with Making Traces and in (and against) time, are shot under very subtle and even light. Similar to Bialobrzeski and Höfer, I use soft, flat light to accentuate the muted colours in a scene, creating an alienating and melancholy mood. However, unlike Bialobrzeski’s who shoots at dusk, I prefer to minimise traces of other light sources and stick to murky, constant daylight. While his choice in lighting may seem alienating, his photographs also have a magical other-worldly quality, whereas my sites, by their seamless tone and flatness, are perhaps more peculiar and quotational than magical.
[ 96 ] The key image of this exhibition portrays a gaunt forest positioned behind a hovering island on a swamp. The image was taken at the tail end of my residency in Paris during a trip to Poland to visit my extended family. An hour or so from Radom in the small tourist town of Czarnolesie lays an historic residence, and now a museum, of Jan Kochanowski–one of Poland’s most famous writers. The museum building was small and modest and situated amongst extensive gardens and parklands. At the time we visited, in the late afternoon, we were the only sightseers. There was little colour in the park grounds, mainly trees and shrubs that could withstand the winter. The site was unspectacular, but non-the-less the empty landscape possessed a simple beauty. It didn’t take long for me to notice the swamp, positioned at the edge of the park, as I had to walk around it to complete a full cycle of the site. Immediately I was struck by its oddness–in the centre sat a tiny house, seamlessly positioned on a pile of earth in the middle of thick, static mud. Birds or small animals had left traceries upon the dense liquid as they’d traversed it. The peculiar appearance of the surface provoked a curious poke from me to check the consistency, but I was left bewildered as to how to physically gain access to the island. It appeared to be drifting, isolated from the encircling landscape, quiet and still.
The photo mural depicts this site [Plate 50]. The image is of a miniature house, an out-of-scale model with a pitched roof enclosing what could be a shelter for birds, and standing beside it is a fallow shrub. Perched on a seamless surface that could be water or a bog, the building seems strangely floating, its size dubious and its location even more curious. The isle, with its structure, seems remote and disconnected from the mainland and the vista of lined trees in the landscape beyond. Here, I allude back to a diaspora that Papastergiadis argues cannot be like a seed made fit somewhere else–my understanding is that consequently we are in drift, stuck between destinations, traversing back and forth.
The two colour photographic prints picture similarly inquisitive landscapes [Plates 51, 52]. Made during a road trip to the north of France, they include: an upright concrete structure, ostensibly heavy, drifting in an open sea; and a spherical form protruding above ground level that sits amidst an open green field.
[ 97 ] [plate 50] Izabela Pluta from à la dérive exhibition, Untitled (float), 2009 Photo mural on adshell paper, 285 x 460 cm
[ 98 ] [plate 51] Izabela Pluta Untitled #1 from à la dérive, 2009 lambda photograph 76 x 76 cm
[ 99 ] [plate 52] Izabela Pluta Untitled #2 from à la dérive, 2009 lambda photograph 76 x 95 cm
[ 100 ] These images deal with the loss of identity signified by an empty site and reflect on Augé’s theory of the dissemination of place. I have employed the desolate and abandoned landscape to allude to a similar psychological space that I associate with–usually in photo murals–the sublime vista or forest mural of the home wallpaper. The forgotten or displaced urban structures, similar to the internal photo mural, indicate a historical memoir or experiential space from the past.
The exception to this has been with Untitled (wall) (2009). This image shows the surface of a building in construction or renovation with the silver plastic that covers the red brick pulled taught by vertically positioned timber stakes [Plate 53]. I presented the structure as a photo mural because the form mirrored the sheer tactility and scale of the edifice in the real world.
I photographed many of these sites in the North of France and in Belgium. I would stop by the side of the road regularly to take a picture whilst driving past and seeing one by chance. Before I knew it, I had a large collection of various constructions concealed by industrial foil during the building process. These facades were usually the result of an adjacent building being pulled down, therefore the neighboring site had to protect itself while the new vacant lot was revitalised. I never questioned why structurally there was a need to conceal the exposed surface. I know underneath the foil were traces of the extracted building’s stairs, bathroom tiles and walls for example.
These walls and their symbolic reference to my work fascinate me. Firstly, they represent the time between an old and a new building being present. Secondly, they appear disconnected from the real world in the fragmented composition; and lastly, they can allude to ways that a place may define and re-define itself over time.
The postcard of Chamonix Mont-Blanc (lac des Gaillands) is like any picturesque vision one may associate with a place of the imagination [Plate 54]. Juxtaposing a found object beside the photographs and photo murals acts as nostalgic reminder of places we have been to or the absence of a place that we now long for. This coupling is indicative of those memories that are evoked though the telling of travel stories or pondering on one’s experience through reminiscence.
The small drawings on the gallery wall resemble maps or town plans [Plate 55]. They reference the different directions coming and going to and from places
[ 101 ] [plate 53] Izabela Pluta from à la dérive series, Untitled (wall), 2009 Photo mural on adshell paper, 285 x 385 cm
[ 102 ] [plate 54] Izabela Pluta Chamonix Mont-Blanc (lac des Gaillands), 2009 found postcard 6 x 9 cm
[ 103 ] [plate 55] Izabela Pluta Maps, 2009 pencil wall drawings, dimensions variable
[ 104 ] and by literally drawing a line on the wall between the towns implies a physical connection between them.
“Mapping the world starts with the primary marker of home. The distinctions between self/other; inside/outside; order/chaos revolve around the prior constructions of the home as the position from which these values can be discerned.”93
The plans originated from an old French children’s geography book. In the context of the book, they are used to illustrate various types of village plans, the most identifiable one being the ancient plan of a fortified rural community. The book discusses aspects of urban town planning ranging from villages to modern urban centers. These ancient plans reference how significant a place can be both historically and symbolically, while at the same time appearing elusive, vague and even possibly have no meaning in the present.
The final piece in the exhibition is a series of prints that resemble an origami pattern, where the folded paper is representative of a house. Anthropological instructions (2009) alludes to what psychologically seems a complex process. Here I have represented this in the form of a ‘construct home’ instructional manual by using a simple line drawing carved from lino and printed in black ink [Plate 56]. The work alludes to the physical quality of place and the optimistic ambition to make a home.
According to Bachelard the space that we inhabit and our imagination, shape our perception of home. If we lack a ‘place’, we create a home that is influenced by the memory image of our old home and our nostalgia for it through the conversion of our surroundings into a sense of place or known history. The photo murals reference this need in us to manifest the past. The vacant, psychologically distant subject and disconnectedness from a reality that is pictured, references the voiding of meaning the experience of movement and migration engenders. The images together convey the fragmentation of the landscape, those glimpses of a fictional place or non-place passed through. The ‘spaces’ imaged represent my own personal experience–and the process of taking the images–of traversing places as well as the metaphorical, à la dérive.
93 Papastergiadis, Dialogues in Diasporas, p.5–6
[ 105 ] [plate 56] Izabela Pluta Anthropological instructions, 2009 block prints from lino, 49 x 66 cm
[ 106 ] Conclusion Place is created through human experience, via cultural significance and a connection to history. Both Lippard and Augé discuss the functionality of place in providing us with a connection to our world. As a migrant myself, I have personally experienced the absence of place and feeling of intense loss that is felt by the cultural dislocation that occurs through the act of traversing nations. Referencing the ways people emigrate for work, refuge, pleasure or to seek a better life, I consider how we may create a ‘home’ or achieve a connectedness to ‘place’ within my art practice.
Architecture may provide us with a reminder of our cultural identity or the place from whence we come. Papastergiadis suggests that the notion of ‘home’ is altered when we move. The idea of moving between places, and how one manifests a ‘home’ in a new location has been the foundation of my creative image making. The proposition that our first house forms one’s idea of home and links us to a ‘memory image’ of that place forever94 resonates with my idea of the ways that we construct our surroundings to achieve a sense of place.
As Papastergiadis suggests we manifest our culture in any place where we are, I have utilised wallpaper (like one that existed in my grandmother’s house in Poland) as a signifier of the type of aesthetic used in migrant homes to recreate a familiar ideal of belonging and as a continual reminder, to them, of their former European vistas and houses. In the gallery space the photo mural embodies these inherent layers of allegory and through its materiality alludes to the recollective intent it holds in a home. I select images for the photo murals carefully, their function is to be both reminiscent of vistas and universal places– familiar but foreign locations. I utilise them to question where the real place might be.
Photo mural wallpaper invokes a somewhat temporary relief of estrangement, however, at the same time it has a long association with deception and illusion. In response to these propositions I have used the photo mural as a medium to convey these thoughts and inform my work. These works allude to the fantasy that one is attempting to create when fixing an imaginary forest panorama
94 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
[ 107 ] landscape to the living room wall. Photo murals, like photographs, can stimulate interactions that are sensuous through their physicality and embody the space (personify the context) into which they are placed.
Like Barthes suggests, a photograph is able to image an absent object. I photograph ‘empty’ spaces to evoke the absent place in the photograph. Just as postcards invite tourists to visit and experience magical places, places that are at once real and invented as a way to ‘remember’ personal experience, I include appropriated found ephemera in my work as a nostalgic reference implying a narrative or illusion similar to that created/invented by the postcard.95
If we can experience place, then we can also move through it. Augé proposes that space is experienced by the traveller and the landscape through which he moves becoming a collection of fragmentary glimpses. In this way, the significance of place may be lost, and we come to exist only within a temporal locale, always in transit or in-between places.
Alluding to seemingly vacant sites in my photographs I use Auge’s concept of movement seeming to provide a solitude, to explore how the significance of an actual place is lost and disappearing symbolic or relational or familiar meaning sets us adrift within that space.
Peter Bialobrzeski’s images of forgotten, used and transitional sites resonates with my own exploration of place. As with Simryn Gill’s method of revealing histories of places and objects, and her complex layering of information from them, similarly informs my way of responding and making connections to places. My imagery possesses a layering and complexity, based not only on human relationships that are linked to memory (of place) and lived experience of a particular location, but also to the overlapping of narratives and remembrances that become physically embodied.
My methodology as an image maker reflects what Lippard refers to as the spontaneous attraction to place through an emotional response to the landscape.96 Landscape seems to me to have an immutable history that mediates a sense of permanence and belonging. Perhaps that is why I am drawn
95 Edwards, Photographs Objects Histories, p.24 96 Lippard, The lure of the local: senses of place in a multicentered society, p.8
[ 108 ] to landscape, as it is a place. I choose sites to photograph premised on a degree of serendipity, as well as an interest in sites displaying aspects of what our culture no longer presents. Like Tacita Dean, I am intrigued by the possibility of chance encounters, grabbing the opportunity and responding creatively to the moment. My imagery visually investigates how an empty site may invoke a longing for a place: how sites of redundant urban landscape evoke an interstitial space; how images void of human presence become distant but at the same time are familiar and how images can provoke us to feel a longing for what is no longer there.
Though my speculative analysis may not be all inclusive of the tangents my creative vision sometimes takes, clarifying for myself the various interests, preoccupations, and obsessions that have come to shape my work has enabled me to articulate and consolidate my thinking throughout the process of my art practice. My work rests as a personal reflection, rather than a biographical representation of the desire for and loss of place; the looking for and finding of place; the imagined place and the reality.
[ 109 ] Illustrations
[plate 1] 6 Izabela Pluta Untitled (ships), 2009 artist proof
[plate 2] 14 Collected postcards from Italy, Belgium, Holland and Germany. Some are hand-tinted photo reproductions of tourist sites, others image tourist destinations packaged in concertina fold-out wallets.
[plate 3] 21 Photo mural wallpaper in my grandmother’s main bedroom, Warsaw, Poland, 1982
[plate 4] 22 Izabela age 5, in front of photo mural wall paper in bedroom, Warsaw, Poland, 1984
[plate 5] 23 Documentation of Italian migrants home, Newcastle, NSW, 2009
[plate 6] 25 Wilhelm Rehlen (c.1795–1831) The Drawing Room of the Princesses Sophie and Marie of Bavaria in the Schloss Nymphenburg, with scenic wall paper La Grande Helvétie, c.1820 Watercolour
[plate 7] 28 Hiroshi Sugimoto Pacific Ocean, Iwate, 1986 Vintage Silver Gelatin Print 55 x 43 cm
[plate 8] 31 Tacita Dean Floh, 2001 Artist’s book made in collaboration with Maryn Ridgewell, Steidl, Gottingen
[ 110 ] [plate 9] 32 Tacita Dean Disappearance at Sea II, 1997 16mm colour anamorphic film with optical sound, 4 min Collections: The Art Institute of Chicago, Frac Bretagne, Chaeaugiron
[plate 10] 33 Tacita Dean Ztráta, 1991/1992 16mm black and white Film transferred from standard 8mm, 3min 30sec
[plate 11] 36 Simryn Gill Garland, 2006 Worn objects collected from beaches in Malaysia, Installation view, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo
[plate 12] 37 Simryn Gill Standing Still, 2004 Pages from artist’s book
[plate 13] 38 Simryn Gill Caress, 2007 Graphite rubbings on paper of various typewriters 90 x 60 cm each
[plate 14] 41 Peter Bialobrzeski Transition 11, 2005 C-print, 30 x 40 cm
[plate 15] 42 Peter Bialobrzeski Transition 16, 2005 C-print, 30 x 40 cm
[ 111 ] [plate 16] 43 Peter Bialobrzeski Transition 20, 2005 C-print, 30 x 40 cm
[plate 17] 44 Peter Bialobrzeski Transition 32, 2005 C-print, 30 x 40 cm
[plate 18] 46 Vittorio De Sica Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief), New York, 1998, Corinth Films, Chatsworth, California, (original un film di “Vittorio de Sica” produzione P. D. S, 1948), (DVD) (89 min.): sd., b&w; 4 3/4 in
[plate 19] 52 Izabela Pluta Home(land) #1, 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 200 x 300 cm
[plate 20] 53 Izabela Pluta Home(land) #1, 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 200 x 300 cm each
[plate 21] 54 Izabela Pluta Home(land) #2, 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 200 x 300 cm each
[plate 22] 56 Izabela Pluta Home(land) #3, 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 352 x 480 cm Installation view, Newcastle Region Gallery, Newcastle
[ 112 ] [plate 23] 57 Izabela Pluta Home(land), 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 200 x 900 cm Installation view, Westspace, Melbourne
[plate 24] 61 Izabela Pluta Making Mirrors, 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 300 x 850cm Installation view, Artspace, Sydney
[plate 25] 62 Izabela Pluta Making Mirrors, 2006 Photo mural on adshell paper, 300 x 850cm Installation view, Artspace, Sydney
[plate 26] 65 Izabela Pluta Making Traces #1, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[plate 27] 66 Izabela Pluta Making Traces #2, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[plate 28] 67 Izabela Pluta Making Traces #3, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 100 cm
[ 113 ] [plate 29] 68 Izabela Pluta Making Traces #4, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[plate 30] 69 Izabela Pluta Making Traces #5, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[plate 31] 70 Izabela Pluta Making Traces #6, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 100 cm
[plate 32] 71 Izabela Pluta Making Traces #7, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[plate 33] 72 Izabela Pluta Making Traces #8, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 100 cm
[plate 34] 73 Izabela Pluta Making Traces #9, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[plate 35] 74 Izabela Pluta Making Traces #10, 2007 Lambda photograph, 100 x 160 cm
[ 114 ] [plate 36] 75 Izabela Pluta Making Traces, 2007 Installation view, Inflight Art, Hobart 100 x 100 cm or 100 x 160 cm each, series of 10 photographs
[plate 37] 77 Candida Höfer Collegium Helveticum ETH Zurich, 2005 C-print 72 1/2 x 81 1/4 in
[plate 38] 79 Izabela Pluta Untitled (defining Paris), 2009 block print from lino, 14 x 20 cm
[plate 39] 82 Grigny la Grande Borne marked with ‘A’ courtesy Google Maps
[plate 40] 85 Izabela Pluta in (and against) time Untitled, 2009, installed photo mural on adshell paper, 212 x 310cm Untitled #1–5, 2009, 5 silver gelatin photographs, 32 x 40 cm each Chamonix Mont-Blanc, 2009, found postcard Maps, 2009, pencil wall drawings, dimensions variable Installation view, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, 2009
[plate 41] 87 Izabela Pluta from the exhibition in (and against) time, 2009 Untitled, 2009 Photo mural on adshell paper, 212 x 310 cm
[plate 42] 88 Izabela Pluta from the exhibition in (and against) time Untitled, 2009, installed photo mural on adshell paper, 212 x 310cm Installation view, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, 2009
[ 115 ] [plate 43] 89 Izabela Pluta from the exhibition in (and against) time Untitled #1–5, 2009, 5 silver gelatin photographs, 32 x 40 cm each
[plate 44] 90 Izabela Pluta Untitled #1, 2009, silver gelatin photograph, 32 x 40 cm
[plate 45] 91 Izabela Pluta Untitled #2, 2009, silver gelatin photograph, 32 x 40 cm
[plate 46] 92 Izabela Pluta Untitled #3, 2009, silver gelatin photograph, 32 x 40 cm
[plate 47] 93 Izabela Pluta Untitled #4, 2009, silver gelatin photograph, 32 x 40 cm
[plate 48] 94 Izabela Pluta Untitled #5, 2009, silver gelatin photograph, 32 x 40 cm
[plate 49] 95 Izabela Pluta Chamonix Mont-Blanc, 2009 found postcard 6 x 9 cm
[ 116 ] [plate 50] 98 Izabela Pluta from à la dérive exhibition, Untitled (float), 2009 Photo mural on adshell paper, 285 x 460 cm
[plate 51] 99 Izabela Pluta Untitled #1 from à la dérive, 2009 lambda photograph 76 x 76 cm
[plate 52] 100 Izabela Pluta Untitled #2 from à la dérive, 2009 lambda photograph 76 x 95 cm
[plate 53] 102 Izabela Pluta from à la dérive series, Untitled (wall), 2009 Photo mural on adshell paper, 285 x 385 cm
[plate 54] 103 Izabela Pluta Chamonix Mont-Blanc (lac des Gaillands), 2009 found postcard 6 x 9 cm
[plate 55] 104 Izabela Pluta Maps, 2009, pencil wall drawings, dimensions variable
[plate 56] 106 Izabela Pluta Anthropological instructions, 2009 block prints from lino, 49 x 66 cm
[ 117 ] [plate 57] 123 Izabela Pluta à la dérive Installation, Mop Projects, Sydney, 2009
[plate 58] 124 Izabela Pluta à la dérive Installation, Mop Projects, Sydney, 2009
[plate 59] 125 Izabela Pluta à la dérive Installation, Mop Projects, Sydney, 2009
[plate 60] 126 Izabela Pluta à la dérive Installation, Mop Projects, Sydney, 2009
[plate 61] 127 Izabela Pluta à la dérive Installation, Mop Projects, Sydney, 2009 plate 62] 128 Izabela Pluta Untitled, 2009, lamda photograph, 121 x 250cm Chamonix Mont-Blanc, found postcard, 6 x 9 cm Maps, 2009, pencil wall drawings, dimensions variable Installation view, Alliance Francaise de Melbourne
[plate 63] 129 Izabela Pluta Maps, 2009, (detail) pencil wall drawings, dimensions variable Installation view, Alliance Francaise de Melbourne
[plate 64] 130 Izabela Pluta Untitled, 2009, lambda photograph, 121 x 250cm Maps, 2009, pencil wall drawings, dimensions variable Installation details, Alliance Francaise de Melbourne
[ 118 ] [plate 65] 131 Chamonix Mont-Blanc, found postcard, 6 x 9 cm Maps, 2009, pencil wall drawings, dimensions variable Installation details, Alliance Francaise de Melbourne
[ 119 ] Appendix
I have enclosed the following publications for the work produced during my MFA:
Exhibition catalogue, à la dérive, Mop Projects, Sydney, 2009 Exhibition catalogue, Un, deux, trios, Alliance Française, Melbourne, 2009 Exhibition catalogue, Making Traces, 2007 Exhibition catalogue, In hindsight the narrative may/may not have been as intended, Inflight Art, Hobart, 2007
Exhibition documentation, installation view, à la dérive, Mop Projects, Sydney, 21 May–7 June 2009 [Plate 57–61]
Exhibition documentation, installation view, Un, deux, trios, Alliance Française Melbourne, 26 February–27 March 2009 [Plate 62–65]
Professional achievements during MFA March 2007–June 2009:
Residencies April–June 2008 COFA Studio at the Cité des Arts International, Paris, France
Awards & Prizes 2009 Finalist, The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award 2008 Australia Council for the Arts New Work Grant The Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant 2007 The Wilson HTM National Art Prize, Finalist The Freedman Travelling Arts Scholarship for Emerging Artists, Winner Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship Janet Holmes a Court Artists Grant
Solo Exhibitions 2009 à la dérive, Mop Projects, Sydney Ver sur Mer, Podspace, Newcastle in (and against) time, Canberra Contemporary Art Space 2008 Singularity, The Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney
[ 120 ] 2007 Home(land), Westspace, Melbourne Home(land), Fremantle Arts Centre, WA
Group Exhibitions 2009 Un, deux, trios, Alliance Française, Melbourne The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, Gold Coast City Art Gallery 2008 An ideal for living, Linden Contemporary Arts Centre, Melbourne Lamp black and zinc white, The University of Newcastle Gallery The Wilson HTM National Art Prize, Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne; Grantpirrie, Sydney; Jan Manton Art, Brisbane Back to the city, temporary public art installation, Newcastle 2007 Here and Beyond, Newcastle Region Art Gallery In hindsight the narrative may/may not have been as intended, Inflight Art, Hobart The Blake Prize, The National Art School Gallery, Sydney Without blue, (collaboration with Paulo Macchia), Vitrine, Platform, Melbourne The City of Hobart Art Prize, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart Scene–Observe the lay of the land, Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery From Space to Place, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
Reviews ‘Ok with my decay: Encounters with chronology’, Simon Gregg, ARTLINK, Vol 29, No 1, 2009, pp.61–63 Back to the City. Strategies for Informal Urban Intervention, Steffen Lehmann, 2009, Hatje Cantz Stuttgart/Berlin ‘Back to the city? The re-berth of coal’, ARTMONTHLY, April #208, 2008, p.5 ‘Izabela Pluta’, TIME OUT SYDNEY, Richard Cooke, April 10 2008, p.39 ‘Inexorable march to ruin celebrated’, THE MELBOURNE AGE, Robert Nelson, April 2, 2008, p.17 ‘Art matters’, MCV, Lucy Elliot, Issue 376, March 20, 2008 ‘An ideal for living’, TROUBLE ARTS TRAFFIC, Cassie May, March 2008, p.12 ‘Domestic sublime’, ART MONTHLY, Melissa Hart, March #207, 2008, p.53 ‘Art around the galleries’, THE MELBOURNE AGE, Megan Backhouse, March 29, 2008, A2, p.20 ‘Lifting the lids’, THE MELBOURNE AGE, April 4, 2008 ‘A singular disconnect’, MX NEWS, Karina Dunger, March 14, 2008, p.6 ‘Making mirrors and breaking walls’, ARTSPACE PROJECTS 2006, Ashley Whamond, p.13 ‘Dilemma of making decisions’, THE WEST AUSTRALIAN, WEEKEND EXTRA, Ric
[ 121 ] Spencer, June 16, 2007, p.13 Published/Reproduced ARTLINK, Vol 29, No 1, 2009, p.61 ARTMONTHLY, April #208, 2008, p.6 TIME OUT SYDNEY, 4 April 10 2008, p.34 An ideal for living, catalogue, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2008, (text) pp.15, 25, (art) pp.15,16,18 TROUBLE ARTS TRAFFIC, March 2008, p.12 THE MELBOURNE AGE, March 29, 2008, A2, p.20
[ 122 ] [plate 57] Izabela Pluta à la dérive Installation view, Mop Projects, Sydney 2009
[ 123 ] [plate 58] Izabela Pluta à la dérive Installation view, Mop Projects, Sydney 2009
[ 124 ] [plate 59] Izabela Pluta à la dérive Installation view, Mop Projects, Sydney 2009
[ 125 ] [plate 60] Izabela Pluta à la dérive Installation view, Mop Projects, Sydney 2009
[ 126 ] [plate 61] Izabela Pluta à la dérive Installation view, Mop Projects, Sydney 2009
[ 127 ] [plate 62] Izabela Pluta Untitled, 2009, lambda photograph, 121 x 250cm Chamonix Mont-Blanc, found postcard, 6 x 9 cm Maps, 2009, pencil wall drawings, dimensions variable Installation view, Alliance Française Melbourne
[ 128 ] [plate 63] Izabela Pluta Maps, 2009, (detail) pencil wall drawings, dimensions variable Installation view, Alliance Française Melbourne
[ 129 ] [plate 64] Izabela Pluta Untitled, 2009, lamda photograph, 121 x 250cm Maps, 2009, pencil wall drawings, dimensions variable Installation details, Alliance Française Melbourne
[ 130 ] [plate 65] Izabela Pluta Chamonix Mont-Blanc, found postcard, 6 x 9 cm Maps, 2009, pencil wall drawings, dimensions variable Installation details, Alliance Française Melbourne
[ 131 ] Bibliography
Books Arning, B. et al, Inside Space: Experiments in Redefining Rooms, MIT List Visual Arts Centre, New York, 2001
Augé, M. Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, (translated by John Howe ), Verso, London, 1995
Bachelard, G. Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994
Barthes, R. Camera Lucida: reflections on photography, Vintage, London, 1993
Batchen G. Burning with Desire–The conception of photography, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1999
Brougher, K. et al. Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2005
Cadava, E. Words of Light: Thesis on the Photography of History, Princeton University Press, Princeton New Jersey, 1997
Carjava, R. Tacita Dean: Film Works, Miami Art Central, Edizioni Charta, Milano, 2007
Courtine, J.F. et al, Of the sublime: Presence in question, State University of New York Press, New York, 1993 de Botton, A. The Architecture of Happiness, Hamish Hamilton, Camberwell, 2006
Edwards, E. et al, Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, Routledge, New York, 2004
French, B. Out of Time: essays between photography and art, The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Parkside South Australia, 2006
Frizot, M. et al, A New History of Photography, Köneman, Köln, 1994
Glasmeier, M. Peter Bialobrzeski: Lost in Transition, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2007
Gorovoy, J. et al, Louise Bourgeois: Memory and Architecture, Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2000
[ 132 ] Gosetti-Ferencei, J. The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature, The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 2007
Kennedy, P. et al, Communities Across Borders under Globalising Conditions: New Immigrants and Transnational Cultures, Dept of Sociology Manchester Metropolitan University and Dept of Sociology and Anthropology, Washington and Lee University, Routledge, New York, 2002
Kwon, M. One place after another: Site specific art and locational identity, The MIT Press, London, 2004
Lippard, L. The lure of the local: senses of place in a multicentered society, New Press, New York, c1997
McDonough, T. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: texts and documents, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, c2002
Malouf, D. An imaginary life, Vintage, London, 1999
Moure, G. Architecture without Shadow, Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona, 2000
Papastergiadis, N. Dialogues in the Diasporas: essays and conversations on cultural identity, New York University Press, New York, 1998
Royoux, J. et al, Tacita Dean, Phaidon, London, 2006
Saunders, G. Wallpaper in Interior Decoration, V & A Publications, London, 2002
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