Page 147 - 2024-catalogus-peterspaans

1998 - 1999 Two series
I created the series “Buildings of the World” and other collages from my desire to better under- stand and absorb the concept of the city. However, I just couldn’t grasp what that exactly means: the city. I still haven’t figured out, which proves that ‘the city’ is so elusive and has become so complex. The city consists of countless fragmented elements, much like what I think I know. My memory is composed of all sorts of fragments. At least, that’s what I believe. I know that every- thing I’ve ever seen is stored on the hard drive in my head, but sometimes I only see parts of it or they emerge later. My brain, or rather my hard drive, doesn’t give everything away right away. Just like the city doesn’t either. My brain is like many rooms, akin to the buildings in the city. I can see the buildings, but what’s happening inside them is often only partially visible. In my small series “Buildings of the World,” I placed images from two cities opposite each other. You might call it a collage, but I hardly changed the photos. The photos are as they are, not cut up; I used the prints as they were. By doing this, I explored the common themes found in the photos. I put together images of places I’ve seen with my own eyes and preserved by photographing them, to blur the boundaries between different areas. New York and Amsterdam, New York and Berlin. There’s no longer a boundary in place or time. Just as it happens in my head. The boundaries blur there too, and that empowers me to believe that everything stems from a single source. And that source is continuous evolution. For me, evolution encompasses the nature that has always been and the new nature. The nature that I refer to as ‘nature in photography.’ The development that humans undergo in the nature around them and the additions they make in the form of matter, buildings, roads, built surfaces. But also the nature in my head, the abstractions, the knowledge, the thoughts, and ideas go through a development. And all of this comes from the evolution of the city, the constant change of the city.
In the collages, as I call them, with the photo strips, I used narrow strips of photos of built environ- ments. These strips release something from the world they represent. You can imagine the entire photo, but also the area beyond the photo. Because a photo is merely a fragment of what I saw and perceived, and that I held onto in the form of a photo. The photo represents both a material and immaterial aspect: the object I saw and the idea it invoked. The random arrangement of these strips represents the immateriality, the splintering of seeing, and the fragmentation of what I saw.
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