Texts

The artist’s considerations on the Time Gap series

2015
by Ana Lucia Mariz

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See also the Time Gap gallery.

When I came upon a lost photograph in a box filled with photos, in a dusty and chaotic antique shop in Athens, I felt a huge curiosity. That image moved me, made me stop, and look quietly. My feeling was something like a Frozen Time, such as those lifeless clocks hanging from the shop’s walls. This was just the first moment, rapidly replaced by a feeling that pierced me.

Later, when I reread “La Chambre Claire” (The Light Chamber), by Roland Barthes, I felt the same funny feeling in my spine when he mentions Lewis Payne’s portrait waiting for his hanging, saying “that-was”, “I watch terrified to a previous future whose bet is death. By giving me the absolute past of the pose, the photograph tells death in the future”.

Returning to that moment when I was standing in the shop in Athens, in front of boxes full of old and abandoned photographs, and I stared at a photograph that had nothing in special but caught my eye, that made me stop and look at it more than mere seconds.

A simple photo of two small children holding hands on a street with a landscape that tells us nothing, next to a man with a natural attitude and, in the background, the detail of a parked jalopy.

In its back, in a faint pencil writing, the date: 1938.

I think I was pierced by something right when I saw the date, although I had already sensed that by the clothes the children were wearing.

The girl, the youngest in the photo, was born before World War II started. This is the information that made me lose my breath. What would have happened to those children during the war?

She may have died during the war, or maybe when she was an adult, or she could even be alive to this day. What would have happened to those children, why would the image be abandoned in an antique shop?

In addition, what touched me in the chosen image was the realization that that image had no memory, something I called a mute image.

The light that burned the silver out of that image no longer exists, just like the negative no longer exists, and the photo’s memory no longer exists either.

In his texts, Didi-Hubermann says that in front of images we are in front of Time.

Indeed, in the image that moved me I noticed there was a restrained Time, that is, in it there were many condensed, pinned down times waiting for a chance to come through.

I see these Times as follows:

the flash time, the moment when that photo was taken;

the powerful time, the time when the image was inside a family album;

the time gap, when the image was forgotten, stored in a no one’s box;

the rescue time, a tiny little moment when the image has a chance to obtain meaning again;

and, finally, the uncertain time, meaning the future that contains all the emotions that image will produce or not on who sees it.

The issue here is: what is this image in front of all the images kept in no one’s boxes?

What will we do with the mute images, will they be rescued, or will they continue abandoned in chaotic shops?

If rescued, will these images be able to produce emotion in the uncertain time?

To add a question to the thoughts addressed, I built a negative of the photograph. Not one in silver and light, not even pixels. I made an embroidery in black fabric and raw thread (of course, an inkling to black and white), I embroidered the image’s scene removing the portrayed people. The memories of those people and of that moment do not exist anymore.

This negative built by me does not tell any story, it only keeps the memory of doing. In the negative/embroidery, Time is not longer relevant, the Time of thinking, feeling, looking, was replaced by the Time of doing, stitch after stitch sewing our own memories, desperately trying to imagine, to deceive itself that one day our memories will not be lost.

Ana Lucia Mariz, 2015