I leave you with a beautiful text by Julio Cortázar, called Instructions on How to Cry.

“Putting the reasons for crying aside for the moment, we might concentrate on the correct way to cry, which, be it understood, means a weeping that doesn’t turn into a big commotion nor proves an affront to the smile with its parallel and dull similarity. The average, everyday weeping consists of a general contraction of the face and a spasmodic sound accompanied by tears and mucus, this last toward the end, since the cry ends at the point when one energetically blows one’s nose.
In order to cry, steer the imagination towards yourself, and if this proves impossible owing to having contracted the habit of believing in the exterior world, think of a duck covered with ants or of those gulfs in the Straits of Magellan into which no one sails ever.
Coming to the weeping itself, cover the face decorously, using both hands, palms inward. Children are to cry with the sleeve of the dress or shirt pressed against the face, preferably in the corner of the room. Average duration of the cry, three minutes.”

 

All collages originated from a digital file of an anonymous patient’s brain scan. After gluing, cutting and pasting phrases, single words and photographs to the collages, I photographed the artwork. By imitating what a magnetic resonance image does with our 3-d brains, I brought the original 3d faculties of the collages into 2d.

(*Thank you Mr. J.P for sharing the brains!)

There is an inherent element of mockery in collage: the put-together is like a painting, but without the effort of painting or the need to know how to paint. Its materials, besides being inexpensive, have the air of having been picked by chance, so the collage seems to say to the spectator, “See how easy it is to make a work of art”.

Harold Rosenberg, Philosophy of Put-Togethers

To see more of my collages please visit my tumblr

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe, which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

In 2002 I bought a large selection of family album photographs in Berlin. For a long time I wondered how to work with these images on a personal project, without altering the essence of them or intervening too much.

Carefully observing them, I realised that the main characters, a German couple, often photographed one another identically positioned within the same setting, producing a series of “double-take” photographs.

The intention of simultaneity of these unknown characters allowed me to create a series of five lenticulars. Making possible their original plan of being together in a frame, the lenticulars transform two photographs into a single moving one. The image above is only an approximation of how they look in real life for the purpose of illustrating the movement.

In a reconstruction of a past, one of which there are no known witnesses, forgotten moments gain a reprieve within the memory and minds of the present. My idea is to destroy the photographic essence of fixed imagery by giving birth to a hybrid that reconstructs a bygone moment. Each of my compositions is static yet simultaneously in flux, acting not only as proof of the past, but as an alternative interpretation of it.

I started this project in 2004, asking people to give me an object that once belonged to someone they had known and a photograph of the person. I later combined both elements, as a gesture of remembrance to the lives than had ended but, through images and objects, continued to be.

Can photography fill the emptiness of death? Is a photograph enough to remember someone’s existence? Could objects and photographs be considered key elements in bringing us back the certainty of a past?

Perhaps in the longevity of objects and images we find the same painful truth: the inanimate cannot die. After we are gone, we might be remembered through small things, pieces of who we were will be kept by others in an attempt to hold on to the past.