2012 Faith Fear Face
In the police files these three words appear often. It’s about loss of faith, fear, losing face; if people have gone to another country and are exploited, have to survive through crime or prostitution, they cannot ever go back. Losing your face.
The structural elements in this installation are shadow projections of the tomato crates they where hiding behind. At the bottom the pallets. Nothing is represented. Beamed by my slide projector, I have drawn all the elements from life, that is to say, all are real shadows.
The only thing I staged is a certain rythm within the space available for my project.
The overall impression is like an oldfashioned contact sheet – framed in black, illusions of positive and negative, of photo and photogram, of image and x-ray are all present.
The figures wriggle around each other, like in Dante’s descriptions. They are barely alive, hovering between life and death. This is not my experience, it is someone else’s suffering. To handle this with the utmost integrity was especially difficult for me. I intended to leave much to the imagination but the panic and the madness should come across.
Making imprints of the skin is as close as one can get to a human being. Skin is DNA, like a finger print.
There is also beauty there. The white paper is very clean. I could not use dirtiness, because it is also about purity, the light inside a human being, not just his shadow.