Lipographic Light Studies, 2022

The term “lipograph” was coined by Martins, inspired by Georges Perec’s lipogrammatic practice. A lipogram is a literary device in which a self-imposed constraint is applied to written language in order to open new and unexpected possibilities of expression. Perec, who spearheaded the Oulipo movement and did most to popularise the form, believed that literary constraint was essential when approaching the most difficult of subjects. In La Disparition, he famously excised the most common vowel in both English and French — the letter ‘e’ — while in Les Revenants, he built a monovocalism based solely on it. For many, that absent letter carries a biographical weight beyond the purely formal: without ‘e’, there can be no mère, no père, no Perec — the letter read as an elegy for his parents, who died in the Holocaust.

It is this understanding of constraint as a form of address — a way of approaching what cannot be broached directly — that Martins brings to bear on Lipographic Light Studies. The series forms part of a larger body of work inspired by the death and disappearance of his close friend, the photojournalist Anton Hammerl, during the Libyan war of 2011.

The works were produced by exposing photosensitive paper to varying light sources, patterns, and wavelengths. Their colours are not chosen but calculated: GPS coordinates associated with sites connected to Hammerl’s disappearance are converted directly into the filtration values — Cyan, Magenta, Yellow — of an analogue colour enlarger. Each line corresponds to either a latitude or a longitude reading; the colour of the first line is derived from the latitude, the second from the longitude. In this way, a coordinate such as 32° 54′ 4.79″ N (Tripoli) becomes 32 Cyan, 54 Magenta, and 4.79 Yellow — location rendered as light, geography as chromatic frequency. The weight and orientation of each line reflects the relative significance of each site to the investigation into Hammerl’s disappearance. Every rip or overlap marks a dead end. Every vertical line, a milestone.

These works are paired with personal photographs recovered from sites Martins visited in the course of his research — routes historically traversed by economic migrants and victims of forced displacement — as well as from the collection of the Archive of Modern Conflict. In these found images, as in the light studies themselves, the referential subject is absent. No clear bridge connects the two sets of work. Only a reverberation: present, persistent, and impossible to fully account for.