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work /
Lipographic Light Studies, 2021
“Lipograph” is a term I have coined, inspired in George’s Perec’s lipogrammatic work.
A lipogramme is commonly understood to be a literary device where a constrain is applied to written language in order to inspire new and innovative ways of storytelling. In La Disparition Perec famously omitted the most common vowel in the English/French language, the letter ‘e’, seen by many historians as a symbol for his missing mother who died during the Holocaust. Without the letter ‘e’, there can be no mère, no père, no Perec.
In this experimental series I have adopted Perec’s lipogrammatic approach to reflect on the abduction, death and disappearance of my good friend, photojournalist Anton Hammerl, during the 2011 Libyan war. I was interested in reflecting on how images can talk about the situation of agency and the difficulty of testifying at any precise moment in history. How images convey an experience of a given moment in time.
The patterns and colours were achieved by exposing photo sensitive paper to different light waves and light patterns and are based on the accounts of journalists I interviewed who were forcibly abducted from war settings. The linear patterns represent mnemonic code that abductees adopted to map out the geography of their journeys whilst blindfolded. In this system, the dots represent bumps on the road, the thin lines dirt roads, the thick lines paved roads, the empty sections undecipherable terrain and so on.
The non linear patterns are representations of descriptions of the visual aspect of abductees’ experiences, once blindfolded: the texture of the material covering the heads, glimpses of artillery fire in the sky, marks on the sand from people running towards and away from conflict, blood splatters in clothing or building walls, etc.
What happens to the brain when it loses a key source of input, such as vision, was foremost on my mind. Indeed, textbooks typically state that the brain will ‘overwrite’ its representation of a body part if input from that area no longer arrives. According to this view, people who have suddenly lost their vision should show little or no activity in the area of primary somatosensory cortex that used to represent it.
However, similarly to people who have had a limb amputated, those that suddenly loose their eyesight continue to experience vivid sensations and images.