Relational tools of speculative ecologies

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which must know each object encountered in life through a new adventure of perception. Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word.’

Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, ed. P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture, 1963

Created as a fragmented series of afterimages, the photo album and instant exhibition is devised as a section of FoAM’s anarchive, taking part in a series of experimental publications revisiting practices of archiving and publishing, unearthing photographic remains resembling stacks or strata of a planet-centred perception. This deconstructed photobook is a compendium of photographic details and visual notes gathered by Rasa Alksnyte, Nik Gaffney and Maja Kuzmanović, spanning geographies and time, decades of walking and watching, bridging southern and northern hemispheres.

Imagined as a moodboard of organic abstraction where transparencies, layers and juxtapositions form constellations of visual notes, not merely as formal elements, but medium and the method unfold correspondences that reveal unexpected, suppressed meanings, deconstructing anthropocentric interpretations, embedded in the art of noticing and documenting fragments - the environment, micro details and larger vistas – a tree, a root, grass, rock, moss, surface of water, fragments of nature in suspended time, landscapes without human presence. The proximity and persistence of the gaze perform temporalities in a silent dialogue of close looking. A collection of visual fragments is revealed in a shuffle, offering a reflexive gaze, bringing counter-images as a contingent tool of de-archiving, exchanging our distant view of the globe for an earthly experience, rooted at the crossroads of media, ecology, and hauntology.

Like afterimages, visual perceptions of something created in memory, after the actual image has physically vanished, the collected photographs seem like echos of images, mirroring impressions of vivid sensations retained after the stimulus has ceased, and like an afterimage resembles an optical illusion that refers to an image continuing to appear after exposure to the original image is gone. But we can think of afterimages, in a metaphorical sense, as well. Exploring transience and ephemerality of nature, collected images, fragments and details, small in scale, emanate an overwhelming resonance of similarities to reimagine the ecologically aware coexistence.

In The Future of Nostalgia Svetlana Boym articulates the image of nostalgia as a double exposure. It is a ghost of an image, a collision of time, in her words – A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/n/nostalgia/nostalgia-svetlana-boym.htmlBut recent planetary fires ranging from Australia, California, or Croatian coast have become everyday reality of the climate emergency that has directed attention away from metaphorical figures and concepts of rhetorical devices of the image on fire, which may act as relational tool. Furthermore, the recent times of confinement and isolation have put into question our mobility, confronted us with profound sensory challenges.

Images of „double exposure“ perform a visual and poetic dialogue of fragments and patterns, exploring poetic proximity and physical distance, connecting distant places from Burma, Brijuni to Brussels, Arizona to Australia, Istra, Japan, Singapore, or Lithuania, spanning continents, reclaiming genius loci, bringing forward images of woods, swamps, rocks, beaches, intertwining colours, shapes, rhizomatic forms, mirror images and textures alike. Those ghostlike images depict fluid organic shapes in different compositions mirroring natural patterns. Fluid and light, they emanate the state of in-betweenness,in between evanescence and preservation of traces in time. Here spectrality of a ghost image, the double exposure, is not a mere question of atmospherics, but a position that may reflect various narratives. Mark Fisher, What is Hauntology?, Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, Fall 2012. Our perception of contemporary environment is haunted by spectres of the past, and by hopes and visions of the future.

Poetic metastructure reveals itself in distant relations, in a dialogue of images of different scale, texture, atmosphere and sensory perception of nature. This leporello A style of parallel folding, “named after Leporello, the servant of the eponymous character in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, who unfolds a long list of Don Giovanni's love conquests.” structured exhibition in a box is bringing together images of distant ecosystems, in a compact and dense miniature exhibition of planetary hospitality and care, to empower connections with nature, empathy, and ecological awareness.