RESTE VON RESTEN [LEFTOVERS], 2017
1) The photographic project Reste von Resten explores with a poetic approximation discarded objects that have escaped the circulatory system of production and recycling, caught between dying and living a second life in a Berlin wasteland. Resisting our efficiency and non-poetic logic of existence, where there is no space for the useless, these leftovers –cause also destruction is not perfect- allow a moment of reflection about our society dominated by the logic of production, consumerism, and quick replacement of older objects for new ones.
In these micro-landscapes, the useless is an element of dissidence able to generate new interpretations, but also of new chances: absorbed by wild nature, the objects become the support of life in a space where life was not expected, in a sort of unscheduled and unstructured process of integration into the landscape. Flowers that use broken glasses to protect themselves from the cold winter, plants that grow upon unexpected surfaces: documenting not the external appearance of objects or phenomena, but -as a forensic scientist would do- their internal state, their microscopic dimension, my intention is to capture the tension between the signs of brutality that the leftover possesses, and its new, unpredictable existence. My methodology consists in adapt the photographic medium to the story I am witnessing, experimenting with textures, approaches, surfaces, trying to figure out what it tell us about the society we are living in.
The title of the project takes inspiration from one of the first objects I encountered in one of my field trip in the Berlin wasteland, which was, paradoxically, a shredded pamphlet about how to include and use rubbish in art.
2) In his latest series Reste von Resten (…) the dumpster becomes as a pretext for a visual poetry of the urban landscape. The photograph materializes a displacement on the useless character of the objects, due to the loss of its original function, which deactivates by an aesthetic decision. The framing of each image, its composition, the angle, the type of light that surrounds it, is a testimony of the real that predisposes to the fragment becomes abstract, absurd, even pictorial; perhaps a representation of a representation. The nature of this movement is mental; recycling and resurrection of a reality and its objects, subsumed, defenestrated, and castrated by the accelerated obsolescence that dominates contemporary life.
Sandra Sosa, Cuban Art Critic and Writer, 2017