Urbanautica

CHRONOGRAPHIES AND THE EXPERIENCE OF TRANSIENCE

by Steve Bisson

"It's not easy to give voice to memories and rekindle the fire of emotions accompanying them. It is necessary to blow on the embers of memory and the burning coals to recall the flame of history."

© Silvia Mangosio from the series "Compost (Diary of my mental health)"

What is time? Twentieth-century physics explained that it is a rather slippery concept, i.e., that depending on the scale, its functioning can vary based on the space that houses it, which can be folded, curved, and perhaps even crossed. And all of this reminds us that there is no "absolute" time since it flows at different speeds or hold a structural weakness. Like a heartbeat that brakes and accelerates in the same body. A verse that invites us to think about the same perception, on the senses and the sphere of subjectivity whose boundaries fade in the darkness. Some argue that time does not exist; or it is an illusion. It is an elusive concept that fascinates humans to the point that they have been working to measure it for thousands of years through various tools. Like the clocks that scan and regulate our lives more than many other conventions.

© Alicja Khatchikian from the series "HEIMWEG / WAY HOME"

As a "point of view," photography is an extraordinary device for plastering the visible in a given instant, preventing movement. As an instant that features the birth of a child, the passage of a comet star, and the breath of a forest. It can't be everything but anything. And in common, these "moments" mirror the desire to make time static. Humans are recording devices. Thus photography is the "writing" of light only because the term's etymology fixes its technical genesis. Yet if we study its function, which has remained unchanged in its rapid evolution, we realize that it is rather chrono-writing. The camera is a "time stopper" not from a physical point of view, due to the thesis on relativity, but from a metaphysical point of view. And memory is, for this, a meta-image, an archive of images. Photography, therefore, tickles the memory.

© Simone Deidda from the series "Pardu Nou"

Furthermore, we need to recognize our presence in space as much as in ourselves (our inner dimension). So places occupy us in this sense and not vice versa. "Places chose you. They take hold of you, whether you wish them or not," recites Nick Cave. Since "everywhere" is turning into a landscape, revealing our presence and thus speaking of us. The landscape manifests history, "semantic stratigraphy," "signs of becoming, "repositories of will," and "entropic language," all facets of the phenomenology of time. Even just looking at the world transforms it in our eyes. Marcel Rauschkolb's retro-photography process, for example, makes it possible to give a face to this theoretical backdrop in the form of a collage.

© Marcel Rauschkolb from the series "Souvenir of Germany"

The author speaks about Griesheim: "For over 130 years, this area was used by German, French and American armies as a training ground, an airfield and barracks. Today the area is in a state of change. When the visible traces are torn down to give place for new housing, nothing will remind of the sites' history. With this, documenting, telling the stories and thus creating a memory theater is Souvenir of Germany's essence. It is about man's impact on the land and local history. But local history is also caused by world history, which is mirrored here." These ingredients, fragments of events floating in the ocean of narratives, mix in the possibility of the contemporary, in the layer of coexistence, in the symphony of echoes, in the choreography of the dead who dance with the living. And this, too, is time to experience. And is this perhaps an operation that draws a map of infinity? A flapping of wings does not produce an earthquake; rather, it moves the potency of the expanding universe since the dawn of time.

© Marcel Rauschkolb from the series "Souvenir of Germany"

Therefore Simone Deidda tries to stitch together through infra-landscape impressions the experience of a rural village emerging from the post-war land reforms aimed at giving a different impetus to local development in Sardinia. These photographs are undoubtedly objective finds, but simultaneously they reveal the author's fascination for geography in transition, uncertain plots, and destiny never granted. They manifest the intent to understand a place, a tribute. Deidda expresses this choice when writing of the series Pardu Nou: "This project has begun with the reference of archive's documentation, maps and photographs from the moment of foundation, focusing on the radical changes that happened throughout time on this territory. One of the fundamental aspects of these changes is represented by the relationship that stands between time, artifice and nature."

© Simone Deidda from the series "Pardu Nou"

In Alicja Khatchikian's series Heimweg (Way Home), time reveals in the crust of a skinned knee, in the gesture of pulling the seat belt towards oneself, in a fogged signal mirror. The author asks herself: "What are family photo archives without someone to tell their stories?" Like saying there is no echo without listening. Starting from a bitter family separation, she opens the drawers of memory. It's not easy to give voice to memories and rekindle the fire of emotions accompanying them. It is necessary to blow on the embers of memory and the burning coals to recall the flame of history. To feel the heat, deposit the traces of history on your skin. Going back to places is this. Rub the world on you. For Alicja, it is to rediscover a river as a metaphor for the distance between two banks, countries, and lives. Amid the silent relationship, there is the intentionality of the gaze. Memory is not a pantry of outdated thoughts but a fertile soil for the imagination. And where imagination exists, there is a true act, not truth. She says: "Over time and repeated visits, my experience of those places has changed, and the prints I have been making expose a different standpoint in the narrative: while searching for a new way home, I started seeing through my own camera."

© Alicja Khatchikian from the series "HEIMWEG / WAY HOME"

The word ongoing is a nice way to describe the present since it ceases to exist the exact moment we think about it. It's immediately passed somehow. Ongoing instead better depicts that alert state of transformation and the awareness that being is always but never now. Silvia Mangosio says of herself with regard of her series Compost (Diary of my mental health): "I've been struggling with my mental health since I remember, but just now I realize what I'm experiencing is bigger than me. All the anxiety, rage, dysmorphia, sadness I feel, they're not just mine: we're all human without refuge." So we return to the need to cope with memories or their conscience, which compresses time and reset it. Yesterday becomes now. But also tomorrow. After all, even the future can be a memory, only imagined. And even though modernity prevents us from independently knocking on the threshold of the future.

And obviously, there is no remedy because we belong to our history, the one that follows us and the one that precedes us, in a constant motion, or evolution, therefore time. "What comes after will not be like what came before" is a Donna Haraway quote that the Italian artist brings to support her feelings, and she adds: "This is my ongoing journey while I try to commit to myself." We are all in progress. We experience transience, the compost of the present, the metamorphosis.

Someone documents the effects as chronographs.

LINKS

Silvia Mangosio (website)
Marcel Rauschkolb (website)
Alicja Khatchikian (website)
Simone Deidda (instagram)

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