Over time the image blurs, wears out, fades like a palimpsest. Telescoping with other events, major or minor, confuses the reading and mystifies the reader.
The photo is copied, recopied, damaged, distorted because it is interpreted in a thousand approximate ways. Meaning is imposed on it, a discourse that it cannot, in its de facto platitude, contest.
It becomes a trace of traces left behind.
Some of these photos were taken in August 1994 in Rwanda - just a few weeks after the genocide of the Tutsi - this series of photos does not tell the story of Rwanda in 1994.
However, they are there were taken, I was there to take them. Now they are part of a reconstructed past.
Does a photographic image tell the truth, any truth? It is perhaps no more than an archive out of context, disconnected from what was the hyper-reality of 1994: survivors who (survived) the horror of horrors.
A visual trace, the photo is banal and needs additional information, a re-contextualization to make sense. In these photo-collages I tried to recreate the dreamlike, disturbing atmosphere where the images of reality float in the twists and turns of the memory of other realities and informational distortion. Like my paintings, these compositions are not illustrations of anything but subjective evocations which question much more than they inform.
