Laurence Favre expands her practice-based PhD project "Expanded spectropoetics" by exploring analog holography as a technique for decentering the gaze and triggering representational shifts. Working with a natural history museum through butterfly case studies, she interrogates the notion of archives while learning holographic techniques with dead and 3D printed butterflies. The research seeks a visual language of the ghostly and haunted that can re-inject sleeping memories into current realities, creating a speculative archive that suggests possible futures beyond anthropocentered presents.
I plan to use this grant to work on research and experimentations related to a specific aspect of my PhD project. In Expanded spectropoetics, decentering strategies with the medium of film -- on the entanglements between colonial and environmental matters, I explore multiple image-making techniques inviting to decenter the gaze (in regard to its anthropo- / western- / male-, etc centrism) and possibly trigger representational shifts.
My practice is mostly based on analog film and photochemical practices. In this fundamental part of the project, I will expand it to the analog practice of holography. I will explore this specific type of imagery and the possibilities it offers in the continuum between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, looking for a visual language of the ghostly, the haunted. By so doing I intend to re-inject sleeping memories in current realities of a (post-)colonial, anthropocentered present and suggest possible futures through the creation of a speculative archive.
I will work closely with a natural history museum. Through a butterfly case study, I am interrogating the very notion of the archive looking at the specific case of its collections. I will take a workshop and have access to a laboratory. This will take place during four weeks over the course of 4 months. I will be dedicated to learning the technique with specific elements (dead butterflies, 3D printed butterflies, other objects) and look at the kind of effect they produce. (In a later phase I will make them enter in dialogue with sound recordings of the specimen collector's diaries).
I hope to find out about different types of imageries and the way they question or disturb our ideas of representation. I am wondering what type of imagery can suggest continuities instead of disruptions in terms of time, space and elements (human, more than human, objects). I want to find out ways of diverting the concept of archive and its anchor in the past, reveal or reinforce its ghostly aspect and search for ways of creating a decolonized speculative archive.
I want to do this project because I don't take images for granted and because I am disturbed by the concept of representation. It is exciting because the making of holograms, as any photochemical practice, is a ground for accidents and unexpected outcomes. And important because despite the danger of their kitsch aspect, holograms do create something a bit magical, that challenges the viewer's perception.
Link: www.lrncfvr.net
Cooperation: Alan Bogana, Pauline de Montmollin
Location: Geneva, Neuchâtel, Berlin