Time Travel Stuff (2018)

In 2018 we were commissioned by Fujifilm a project reflecting on the role of photographic paper in a present characterized by an increasing digitalization process.
Through the collaboration with the engineers working at Fujifilm Europe we conceived a wider reflection on the durability of the supports that carry images, inevitably dealing with one of the most intriguing questions concerning the present: the life and afterlife of images (what Joanna Zylinska calls “photography after us”). The amount of pictures produced yearly and accumulating on servers, hard drives or other kinds of physical supports, constitutes an impressive volume of materials that will last for centuries or millennia. For future geologists or archeologists, our images will look like the prehistoric paintings in the caves of Lascaux: impressive in their quality and yet unreadable, open to several interpretations.
Trying to address the manifold relation of photography with time, we designed a time capsule for Unseen Photography Fair 2018 which was filled with the pictures produced by the visitors and eventually buried at Fujifilm Europe, in Tilburg.
The exhibition was completed by a series of images reflecting on the idea of pictures that will last after us through a parallelism not just with prehistoric or ancient man-made images, but with the whole Earth as a huge archive of corrupted messages.

This project was made possible thanks to the support of Fujifilm and Unseen Photography Fair.
Production: Stefanie Hofman
Curator: Amelie Schule