I am a poet and translator living and working on unceded Gubbi Gubbi Country. My research project is bogged on about half a page of Alain Badiou’s preface to Saint Paul where he discusses the works of George Bataille, Jean Genet and Pier Paolo Pasolini and their individual approaches to the dialectic of the sublime and abjection.
My Archival Zone takeover theme came about after watching the holocaust documentary film Shoah. I completed the film over a couple days and took hundreds of screenshots. It was a hard film to shake off and the late poet Sean Bonney’s final collection Our Death provided me with many distractions and diversions as did the music of The Pogues.
Jesse Langille is an artist, curator of images, maker of zines, and a photography collector. He studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design and resides In Philadelphia
Life is the dark unresolvable jumble, the mysterious and chaotic bundle of incomprehensible sensations, all tied and mixed together. Demons keep occurring behind, throughout and beyond the objects of the so-called “real world”; they invite the eyes and all the other senses to further proceed, to go into the realm of exceedance they give way to, to discover the inner nature of appearance. They are the faces of that terror implied in the direct sensorial approach to reality, in the full experience of the world surrounding us. They’re expressions of the trauma, the bolt shaking and ravaging the ground of ordinary perception, exceeding it, paving the way to an unprecedented and unknown dimension we’re given access to: infinite, unresolvable, incomprehensible. The grotesque and violent element they often exhibit is mostly linked to an expressive characteristic which is typical of the sensations of terror and anguish one can encounter being participant of an over-whelming experience, one that can submerge and overflow the senses, abruptly throwing them into a state of irreversible and unstoppable chaos. This makes the consciousness feel as if it was part of something incredibly bigger than itself, enormously more complex, profound and alive than what it’s capable of understanding. They also have this feature of fickleness, being both metamorphic and shapeless, inorganic, being direct expression of that relentless force of mutation, the ever-flow of heraclitean becoming, which eventually sums up all of the entropic changes, the hybrid mutations, the inexplicable reciprocity they borrow one from the other, meeting up, then undoing themselves, disappearing and then recovering in different, unexpected forms and states. For in the darkness looming over from this in-between folded dimension, it is most importantly required to be present, sharp focused and to listen very carefully. If one is able to plunge into it without any preconception or preview of sort, things startlingly regain their inner core of pulsating chaos. Then the observer is continuously melted into it, so that polarity of the paradigm of reality gets shifted, or maybe even nullified, giving way to a void paradigm, or non-paradigmatic condition in which everything of what is “exceeding” is real and nothing of what is “imaginary” is no more unreal.
Barbara Levine is an artist/collector of offbeat vernacular photography and most known for using her collection (recently acquired by the MFA Houston ) as the foundation of my artistic practice which includes books, archive projects and exhibitions. My wife, Paige and I built the collection together and one of our favorite themes is defaced and captioned snapshots
“‘I’m not only writing for myself anymore’ is a dialogue between my father’s images and mine. During ten years I photographed my younger sister and recently I begun to associate this series with the pictures my father took of me as a child. I discovered echoes and similarities between the photographs I captured and the ones my father took off me. Unconsciously repeated these images describe the link between different generations of a unique family.
‘Loyalties’ is a corpus of photographs, drawings and cut-outs papers on photographs. From family albums, I became interested in the gestures that repeated from one album to another, from one generation to another. Some détails appeared to me, fragments that I have cropped, in order to recompose new images. Those images, than assembled in dyptichs, highlight relationships between two bodies through the years.”
