ARTIST STATEMENT

In the practically oriented course of everyday life, we are increasingly passive observers of the world and its representations, which, like stereotypes, help to make our environment predictable and recognisable. So, when I entered the realm of auteur photography, I asked myself the following question: what means and ways of seeing should be used to show the back side of this apparent orderliness, its deviations and contingencies, its radical openness to (re)interpretation?

In view of the dilemmas described above, I do not perceive photography as an expressive form that seeks to truthfully reflect and interpret the world around us through mimesis. The logic that is at work here and that I try to leave aside in my work is thus best illustrated by the connection between seeing and knowing – which has its epistemological and etymological roots in the ancient Greek term theory, which means nothing but – to observe. In place of documentarism and mimesis, the performative act itself is increasingly coming to the fore, encompassing everything from staging to the way the photographs are taken, the choice of materials and printing techniques, and the presentation of the photographs. In the reception of my work, I consider the living contact of the viewer with the image to be crucial, and the material and the format of the presentation (exhibition, book, etc.) require me to reflect thoroughly about how to further enrich and enhance the aesthetic experience through the aforementioned means. This gesture is underlined by the deliberate abandonment of rounded and complete images. They are replaced by fragmented representations of the world and its liminality, without a predefined meaning.

This authorial approach naturally includes the choice of motifs and themes. If in my early works, for example in my graduation project The Image of the Image, it was still possible to discern strong connotations of the problem of ecological degradation of rural areas and their pressing social issues of hopelessness, brain drain, suicidality, the disappearance of urban culture, etc. – which reveals this series of photographs as conceptual, pre-conceived images, which only need to be adequately realised – my next work, the master's thesis, is already a breakthrough with such a mode of creation. 

With Nokturno, published as a photobook by The Angry Bat, I explored the performative act in depth and changed my way of working, and with it my focus and motifs. I have exposed either individuals or objects to unfamiliar situations or placed them in environments that are unusual for them, with the intention that their depiction would evoke in the viewer a certain degree of unfamiliarity and alienation – two sensations so characteristic of the night before humanity succeeded in unenchanting it through the processes of modernisation. The abandonment of complete control or detailed consideration in advance of how the objects would act in space or how the subjects would react to new situations also resulted in a huge stock of photographic material, which I was then able to edit and rearrange again into different compositions and connections, so that the photographs could take on a life of their own beyond the fixed meanings or contexts in which they were made.

This was followed by Mnemosis consisting of decontextualised images created using the infectious method of processing photographs in a darkroom. The topic I am addressing here is the phenomenon of parahypnagogia, i.e. the altered state of consciousness between sleep and wakefulness, a collage of vague daydreams, latent thoughts and fleeting memories. I try to evoke the content of these mental images and our feelings while experiencing them, which, once fully awake, elude memory and its reconstruction, by means of images technically full of errors and distortions that do not reveal the qualities of the object or subject originally depicted. The images obtained in this process thus mimic the intangible, dream-like aura of the phenomenon of parahypnagogia, the content of which is not entirely confined to immediate reality, just as, analogically, the subject of the representation is not confined to his own photographic image. Mnemosis, as the title suggests, offers itself to the viewer as a means of recalling these inner experiences.

A similar alienation effect is at work in the Invasive Alien Species series. Although invisible to the untrained eye most of the time, there are many non-native, invasive plant species in the ecosystems of our immediate surroundings. Some of them, found in the vicinity of my residence, have thus become the object of representation – removed from nature, i.e. from the space in which we are accustomed to encountering them, and “portrayed” individually, they take on abstract but still recognisably organic forms – which, paradoxically, due to man's everyday involvement in one natural space or another, only make them truly alien and unusual. This effect is further enhanced by the direct application of the emulsion on paper made from Japanese knotweed, which is considered an invasive species in Slovenia. By using this specific paper in the printing process, I have literally integrated this plant and added my own, admittedly insignificant, piece to the mosaic of efforts to preserve the original environment.

The Territory project is a logical step in the development of my starting points, working processes and motifs. If the photographs from the Invasive Alien Species series offered a different view of the plant world that surrounds us, this time the focus is on the landscape in general; I am not interested in photographing the landscape as such, but rather its topological, geological and other features, that is to say, the details that allow me to abstract from the actual territory and, in this manner, to discover or recreate it anew. Thus, with my means of expression, I may be opening up room for another, rhetorical question: what can be made out of what is still or already available all around us, without us really being aware of it?

Andrej Lamut