People have stories. It may be a story you haven’t heard before. I am thinking about ownership of history - who gets to tell their story and who doesn’t, and why?
The effects of our species, our histories, our traces, are literally written into rocks. Rocks act like black boxes, databases, cameras, recording our drive towards extinction, through the pollutants the Government sanctioned Petrocapitalist corporations push into the sky. How we read these traces depends on who we are and what we’ve been taught.
People are attached to their stories, their origins, their cosmology. It forms who we are. But we are also in flux, evolving, and becoming. Our identities and our awareness of selves is never static.There will never be a singular truth. That would require objectivity.
These excavations explore real and imagined stories, about racism, capitalism, joy, grief, healing, self expression and love. Through physical excavations into photographs, photographic paper is torn, burned, ripped, making space for new ideas and ways of being.
In her book The Civil Contract of Photography Ariella Azouly says “In photography - there is something that extends beyond the photographer’s action, and no photographer even the most gifted, can claim ownership of what appears in the photograph.“ Here is a collection of images from multiple people and perspectives, adrift from their original contexts, dug up like an excavation, ready to be read and remade.
What we remember is just as revelatory as what we forget.
