These images are first and foremost characterized by their strange temporality – caught as they are in a passage between two times, or perhaps, more precisely, in a time before time, where everything is in the process of becoming formed. This precise moment will no doubt disappear in the completed shape of the buildings, as something inessential and transitory, but here it is rescued into the eternity of the photographic image, as a suspended history, a threshold being crossed.
Still these photographs do not speak in a nostalgic or restoring mode: they do not dream of the past, but rest in their unsurmountable facticity. Everything is registered in an almost hallucinatory light, in an exaggerated contact with reality, or through a perceptual capacity that liberates the gaze from its centered and thematic function. There is too much to see, too many details craving attention without being able to motivate their urge to be seen. An emptying of meaning, but also inversely an overabundance of meaning, as if the images approached its very threshold, where no types of connections have yet been established, and all that can be seen is the empy framework of the social grammar. No function has yet been specified, and the buildings remain divested of their symbolic values (housing, work, law, pleasure...). They are caught in between, before all the various narratives have started to spin their explanatory web around the world, before the social attractors have started to differentiate this primary space.
From chaos arises form: perhaps this is how we should understand the recurring theme of building sites. How does a form emerge from a chaos of seemingly diverse details; what transforms the desolate and barren Place to a Home, to intimacy and habitability? What does it mean for space to be inscribed within a human, symbolical order, and above all: does anything remain? Is it possible to figure this other Real remaining outside of the dimension of language, as a residuum that will not let itself be incorporated?
As if to stress the ambiguity of such a position, an inverse movement occurs. The established form becomes invested with an irresistible contingency, and it is somehow brought back to matter, to its own facticity: the zero point of language. This movement “on the spot” is caught in the passage from chaos to structure and back to chaos again, in a hovering between home and homelessness: das Un-heimliche.
Nothing is more foreign to these pictures than the mysterious energy invested in ruins, and their romantic reference to a monumental history beyond the horizon, an obscure past invested in those forms now in the process of being brought back to nature. The time “before time” of these images is not a mythical past lodged somewhere in a dim memory, but a moment on its way into our history, a forward movement whose energy has not yet been spent. If there is a secret and a mystery here, it lies in the completely visible – not in these images’ archaic references, but in their absolute modernity. The difference between nature and culture is consequently not pertinent. Bengt Olof Johansson seeks out a position where nature has already been incorporated into the technical sphere, and the antique opposition between physis and techne has been superseded in favour of a third position, neither artificial nor natural. “Man’s relation to localities, and through localities to space, rests upon inhabiting. The relation between Man and space is nothing else than inhabiting thought in its essence. Only if we are able to inhabit, are we able to build” (Heidegger, Bauen, Wohnen, Denken). Is it such an inhabiting these images circle around, the scene for the first contract between Earth, Man and World? Only on the condition that we think it without nostalgia, that we understand the home and the hearth as already drawn into technology, and the original placelessness as the condition of every Place.
In accordance with such a view of the relation between locality and space, these images’ strict compositional form renounces all vaguely aestheticizing features. Perhaps one could talk about a constructivism, were it not for the fact that the overt references to building sites transform such a concept into a pure tautology. The images are magical precisely in their prosaic lack of magic, obscure in their very clarity and absence of chiaroscuro. Consequently their enigma lies in the fact that the stage as well as the background machinery are displayed in front of our eyes, as a meta-scenography striving to rework its own origin, to state the laws of its own language, and therefore unceasingly returns to its own materiality.
Sven-Olov Wallenstein |
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