Trust Pink or Africa Close Enough to Spoon It Up
The greedy eye is satiated. So what might annoy the quick look trained for momentariness? Travelogue, quite object/ively.
Equipped with camera, lenses, photo situations, playing elements such as artificial fingernails, gold foil, plastic plates …
Setting off, to Africa. In a corner of my mind: the idea of men’s alienation from themselves; and all sitting in the same boat – with or without a secret, with or without gold, with or without guilt. Shooting photos.
Taking pictures is always associated with a certain amount of physical aggression I reflect, shooting from the hip. Under cover, so that nobody has to take notice: no bird, no still life, no tree and no medicinal plant and no man either. And still, this “freezing of time—the insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph”, as Susan Sontag phrased it, has little to do with understanding anything; it is rather collecting, ransacking, preserving, condemning, romanticizing the sequestered truths. Actually I don’t care all that much about it though.
Thou shalt not make graven images. But a picture to me means presentation—not so much an image, a painting or a photo …
Picturing something or somebody means (even literally) imagining it, or them; putting someone in the picture: make them understand. However, what’s there to understand? Our “understanding”, or civilized common sense, has brought untold disaster and made feeling inaccessible; packing it, unpacking it, dumping it. Nothing is good enough, get new stuff. Bottomless pit. And no place, nowhere is sufficiently far away to escape this reality.
REALITY—a process on wheels. You want to run away from it, but it’s already there before you, rolls all over you to get at the next guy: intrusive, spic and span, relentless, absurd and consistent. Trust pink!

Text: Petra Hornung, 2010, Translation: Werner Richter