artistic text about "Cat on a leash", written by Jessica Tille
Fast on a highway in the metropolitan jungle, a flickering occurs behind closed eyes. Shadows of buildings cut out a glowing red sun on the surface of eyelids in melodic rhythms, a visual bass-line, rolling through from left to right, felt through hot and cooler shades on skin. Behind eyelids, the structure of the city produces a score, orchestrated by light and its absence.
With closed eyes, the tangibility of one sense through another slips through pores, sound evoking visuals, visuals evoking sounds, with the subsequent impossibility of concrete translation. Beyond vision sleeps a feeling, that inscribes itself into matter, when tangible sound waves echo through liquids of chemical processes to create analogue photographs. An attempt to rather feel, not fill, the gap; in only one try for this split-second. A gesture that could capture the nature of vibration, vibrantly.
As sunrise and sunset change their rhythms within the seasons, living beings adapt their daily routines. Like moths circle around light, all living organisms are in continuous movement, as well as the structures and concepts they build - societies in a city, in which humans wind their bodies like snakes, within hierarchies, constraints and freedom, striving for new experiences and knowledge, located in places apart from all attached leashes. What is invisible even in broad daylight, might become visible with closed eyes.
The night is a time to cut the leash. To un-leash a creature, that excavates the corpse of a narrative. Light, as the backbone of photography, is absent at night. When day moves into night, a transplantation takes place inside the organism, natural light is replaced with artificial brightness and something else arises - vibration as bending bones inside silhouettes. The camera throws a leash, catches pieces in motion, inscribes them into the rolling skeleton. The film-roll as wrapped night in traces of bodies sticking together, fragments of frameworks in movements. As photography in darkness leaves chance to the image, there is a fold for the unconscious to inscribe itself into the image. The night writes itself into the film-roll, Co-writer rolls itself into a dizzy roll. A leash cut and attached around a creature of the night, taming the tail that is rolled out all around the city on 35 mm.
A second sun arises, as Doppelgänger of the sun, arises as Ghostwriter.
In the absence of light at night, there are two ways of revealing: The flash of the camera and long exposure time. Early photography was attached to beliefs that seem like dark fairytales. Catching the soul of a being by taking a picture, with magical light as drawing tool, sun ray as tail that autonomously, without body, creates a haunted vision. Myths fueled by the blinding harshness of flashlight, with the subsequent eerie phenomenon of seeing oneself - seeing the Doppelgänger - appearing on a surface other than the mirror. Beliefs that are rooted in the materiality of the analogue technique, where ephemera in space, atmospheres of the blink of an eye, materialized magically inside a machine beyond vision. As the roll curles up inside the camera, like a cat on a lap of an immortal person, what is added and lost by the translation through the machine stays as blurry as the reconstruction of memory from photographic fragments seems like healing broken bones. What stays beyond, in the gap, hiding inside-outside? In this archeology without end, the bones of the night circulate inside the film roll, while re-excavating, re-sorting, re-contextualizing and rethinking the past into present. The excavation of narratives reveals a creature emerging from the folds of photographic storytelling, extending the body into night vision. The extension of perception through the camera takes place with eyes closed - seeing more by flash and long exposure time in haunted eyelids - Bodies rolling, twisting-cracks inside this roll, with every second sunrise.
Sunset, second sun. Being exposed, enclosed -sent- and excavated again from exposure to light. Long exposure of the camera makes time visible, creates light from time, while long exposure to the sun burns faces, somewhere, while eyes turn red from screen light at night. Excavating moments from exposure to light, back then - blurry, diffuse images, nothing stays sharp in movement, like leftover memories about this night in some heads, somewhere. Individuals become silhouettes, places become shapes, like oil-paintings of sunsets in iconic places. A state of mind, a feeling, behind closed eyes, transported into vision. Building materials for an architecture one can enter only behind eyelids as well.
Sunrise, second sun. Flashlight produces reality in sequences, crisp, an awareness that time passes moment by moment, one after the other and after the other the one is gone. As brutal as subtle it freezes movements into steady forms, anonymity is dissolved, individuality enhanced, freezes so deep, it could treat the sun-burn, in a split-second call for attention as interruption. Flash forms ice-cubes for Hot Americano, to stay awake through enhanced caffeine, while sunburn from screen light. Vision is corrupted, unless - eyes closed - a look towards the camera, the operator of the camera stays hidden behind the cloud of flash, face covered while records are slipped out of their covers to spin into loss of orientation, licking the floor.
Inside the camera, enclosed group dynamics, curled up in a roll, their vibration felt with closed eyes, like a purring cat. Develop yourself as the roll is developing with the others, layer by layer reconstructing the night with closed eyes, to be part of the group and with the others again. Identities and personalities forming new constellations in spotlight, next to each other, in a row and driving apart.
Throwing leashes around precious memories of past experiences, keeping track of traces of the night. With every revisiting of the memory it over-writes itself, Ghostwriter, Co-Writer, another layer, stacked on top. Reconstructing the night individually, in a shelter behind your eyelids, flashing inside-out.