Medium
Chemigram, Scan printed on aluminium Dibond
Year
2020
Edition
1
Size
30 × 136 cm
Art project
Tralfamadore
About the project
This project is based on Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five and its central motif of non-linear time. Its protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, becomes "unstuck in time", drifting randomly between moments of his life. He is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who see in four dimensions, the fourth being time. Vonnegut illustrates this with the image of a mountain range: humans, standing on a single peak, can only see their immediate surroundings, while the Tralfamadorians see the whole range at once, from a distance. Having already seen every moment of their lives, they cannot change anything, but can freely choose which moment to spend time in, while humans have no choice but to follow time in a straight line.
Starting from this story, I experimented with different techniques for creating abstract landscape images, using chemigram, a photochemical process without camera or negative. On baryta paper, I moved a mixture of oil and developer across the surface; varying lengths of contact with the developer produced different shapes and gradations of colour, the oil acting as a partial delay. The resulting small image was then scanned and enlarged about 40 times, so the paper's grain becomes visible, and the image enters a dialogue with the viewer, caught between the whole and its details, echoing Vonnegut's novel once more.
» The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. «
– Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five
