Abstract
The author has a crackly relationship with photography. In fact, they have at times struggled to see eye to eye. Photography has seemed awkward, with its sharp, obvious, physical boundaries and flat, printed surface. Yet, as an artist, the author has come back to photography again and again. When making autobiographical work, the author brought the camera with me to places where there has been pain. But the author has often wondered if photography cannot offer enough. In this chapter, autobiography is fragmented and messy. It includes sexual violence, and moreover, the folding of these experiences into the self. The aim is to discover if and how these experiences alter interactions with hierarchy but also influence artistic vision and methodology.
TopIntroduction
I have a crackly relationship with photography, but in my work as an artist, I have been drawn to use it to talk about my biography. I have used photography to create evidence, from memory, of some of the things that continue to pain me. In doing so I have asked photography to come with me into complex and violent narratives. Me and the camera travelled to rural Sweden for the work Prologue (2013). We drove through thick and dark forest, then walked along the same tracks that I walked along years ago, only the last time what awaited me when I arrived was sexual violence. I remember it was springtime the last time I came here too, it must have been just after the turn of the millennium. We would have a few months earlier thought that, somehow, life would be so different in this new era. We entered the 2000s with a mixture of fear and excitement, unaware of what the new year might bring. More so this year than any other year it seemed. Violence has become the subject matter of much of my artwork after Prologue. I am reflecting now on how these experiences of violence sit within my artistic practice as subject matter but also the way it has impacted how I make work.
I am in the south-west of Sweden, in a place where the tarmacked roads give over to ones that are hard packed with dirt and tufty grasses and weeds growing between the wheel tracks. In the summers the roads erupt in dusty clouds as cars pass through, heading on to somewhere else but rarely stopping. On weekends, on the brink of teenagehood, we drank moonshine with coffee in dimly lit cottages. Then we moved along to the lake on mopeds and tractors, our voices and laughter echoed into the forest night.
Figure 1.
Prologue (© 2013, Elin Karlsson.)
That particular day, in springtime 2000, I asked my mother if I could go to his house after school, it might have been a Tuesday or a Wednesday, and she promised she would pick me up after work. As I revisit to take the photographs, I am face-to-face with the past, which seems folded into one with the present right here. I am back in the place that I have spent my life running away from, having been brought here by memories that seem more dreamlike, well nightmarish, than real. But after a decade or so of being in a state of amnesia about the whole thing, the anger and disgust that had lingered around intimacy and trust found its true harbor and hence, I am now back on this dirty road.
Figure 2.
Prologue (© 2013, Elin Karlsson.)
Key Terms in this Chapter
Flatness: The quality of having a flat surface without any raised parts or indents, but also an unenthusiastic attitude or mood
Interdisciplinary: Relating to more than one area of knowledge. Used here in relation to art practice methodologies or artworks that position themselves between dominant disciplines or genres.
Deterritorialise: With this concept Deleuze and Guattari speak about changes to the status quo. Whenever something new is incorporated into something else it is deterritorialised. Whenever that new something is fully integrated it is reterritorialised, but in a slightly altered state to before.
Materiality (of the photograph): The idea that the physical qualities of an object are important for how the object is used or understood
The major and the minor: The position of the major is held by the canon while Deleuze and Guattari think about the minor as that which operates towards the boundaries of the major territories. Within the minor is an urge to create and the issues of finding and having a voice within a medium that is both familiar and violating.
The Fold: The idea of the fold appears throughout Deleuze’s writing but becomes particularly mobilised in his writing on Leibnitz and Foucault. It is in essence an idea around subjectivity and how it is created through our relationships with the body, with memory, and with time. Foucault speaks about the mastery of the self, and the creation of power through (later Christian) ideals around a domesticised sexuality, where the mastery of one’s own urges equates to power inside and outside the home. The creation of the self is a folding of the external into the internal such that the boundaries between the two disappear.
Unfurling: Becoming extended from a folded state. For instance, the unfurling of a sail.