This work is an immersive video and photography installation that reimagines a post industrial landscape shaped by chemical residue, ecological resilience and spectral beauty. The work speculates on terrain that is at once terrestrial and extraterrestrial; an altered ecology with resilient forms in unnaturally vivid pigmentations, where human presence lingers through stains, residues and distorted geologies. It proposes an ambiguous future tense: one where the landscape is read not as ruin but as inheritance. Rooted in questions of queer ecology, speculative archaeology and post humanism, the images and projections, made in situ with chemical residues, pigments and analogue film, work as speculative acts- witnessing and reimagining what the earth remembers.
Giving the blues is a series of photographs and photo gravures of the Cascate delle Marmore, the Marmore waterfalls in Umbria, Italy. It is the largest man made waterfall in the world at 165 metres high, and was created by diverting the Velino River into the Nera River Gorge by the Romans in 271 BC to drain the mosquito ridden marshlands in the area. The waterfalls were greatly admired, and referred to in the writings of Virgil in the Aeneid, written about by Dante Alighieri, and by the Romantic poet Lord Byron. Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Rosa, and JMW Turner all depicted them, as they represented the epitome of the sublime experience. Today, the water can be ‘switched off’ as its flow is regulated for hydro electric power generation- at times there is no waterfall, at others it appears again. This is a depiction of the constructed nature of our natural landscapes, shaping the world to suit our own aesthetic and needs, the Anthropocene in action.
Astonished by its scale and history, I chose to use turquoise and Prussian blue pigments to print these images, both as large scale pigment prints and photo etchings, drawing on the colours of architectural blueprints. Turquoise pigments are among the oldest known blues used by the Egyptians, while Prussian blue is one of the first commercialised synthetic blues created purely by chance by the German alchemist Johann Dippel and a pigment maker Johan Diesbach in 1704. It was used extensively in Japanese Aizuri-e woodblock prints (such as Hokusai’s The Wave) and in Picasso’s blue period. The story of blue pigments is the history of the world, and of art. Blue is a colour that is so prevalent in nature, yet so ephemeral (the sky, the sea, etc.) as it is largely an illusion of the eye or a refraction of light. There are few naturally occurring blues in the world: indigo, ultramarine and azurite are the few, but require much labour and expense to make. Cobalt blue has a difficult history of exploitation and extraction in the Congo. Yet the composition of Prussian blue (iron salts and cyanide essentially) is the very composition of cyanotypes (blueprints). It’s invention during the Romantic period, nods both to the exalted nature of the image and to the alchemical precursors of photography, engraving and etching used to depict it. These waterfalls then, become the ‘blueprint’ for all waterfalls, acting as the ultimate illusion of a natural wonder.
These photo etchings use the Prussian blue and turqoise pigments referred to in the introduction to the project. They are 60 cm x 70 cm and can be framed or mounted onto the installation, or around the installation.
Below is the projected film of the waterfalls onto the large scale fragmented installation of photographic pigment prints (printed from analoge originals)
The Fall (2025)
These photo etchings can be combined with a multimedia installation of a projection onto the surface of a fragmented, large scale version of the waterfalls as pigment prints.
In Blue Cave, part of the same series, subterranean caverns beneath the falls form a counter-scenario. Shaped by dripping water over calcium carbonate, stalactites and stalagmites grow like casts of shadows. These caves recall Plato’s allegory, where appearances stand in for reality, and also echo photography itself—light revealed through narrow apertures, images born from darkness. In the Romantic imagination, such caves signified subconscious depth and scientific discovery, hollow stages for wonder.
The Atacama desert is the driest place on earth, visible from outer space, and the stone heart of our origin story. I have always been fascinated by its dual narratives of visibility and invisibility- it is where the most advanced astronomical observatories and telescopes are pointed at the sky, the A.L.M.A (Soul, in Spanish) or Atacama Light Millimetre Array for example, which looks for the origins of our planet. Thousands of meteorites have been found there, fragments of comets and asteroids, and in some cases, pieces of the moon or Mars. We carry these traces, as minerals in our bones, and others like gold, silver and platinum, we wear on our fingers. These appeared on earth from violent collisions of supernovas in outer space. We search these lunar landscapes as part of our origin story, when really we carry these traces inside ourselves. We extract these elements from the core of the earth, digging down into its dry underbelly, to power our lives. I went to see the moons of Saturn from a telescope in the desert and took otherworldly photographs of the Martian geologies. I collected salt from the salt flats on the Altiplano, copper debris from the abandoned copper mines and iron ore from stones I walked on. Pinochet dropped the bodies of the ‘Desaparecidos’ there in the 70s and 80s, where their bones would blend into its rocky dry surface, hiding them from view. He didn’t reckon on the grandmothers and mothers who, years later, would comb its terrain metre by metre to find their loved ones in an impossibly forensic resistance to these state crimes. In the Atacama, we remember that we are born of a stone heart, of the deep pulse and slow rhythm of deep geological and sidereal time. Here, I have taken photographs, videos and made solar plates, to create an installation that explores and reimagines my encounter with these landscapes- the very places that provide the minerals we need to create photographs and photo etchings in the first place: copper, for the plates, salt for development, silver for the light sensitivity, iron and lithium for digital batteries. By introducing these colours and minerals into the images, it reminds me of photography’s own alchemical origin story, of the stardust in my bones, and our need to understand these embedded and intertwined histories.
These photographs were taken in the open desert, in its lunar landscapes and filtered with saturated colours to enhance the otherworldly nature of their geologies.
Here are details of the photo etchings, using collected stone pigments and highlighting the heat of the desert in its red carmine ink. This ink is made from the cochineal beatles that live on cactae that grow south and north of these desert areas, in Peru, Bolivia and Argentina.
The installation includes a projected looped film onto the surface of the photographs. I made this film with footage of the Atacama and the coastlines of Chile, where pollution from the mining and extractive industries in the Atacama empty into the waters there. It is ephemeral and spectral, referring in turn to the ancestral waters and magma that would have created these geological formation billions of years ago
Spectral Matters is an exhibition by Victoria Ahrens and Joao Villas, whose work references the ephemeral materiality of sound, video, photography and print. Creating installation pieces, they look to deconstruct the photographic image through material interventions, to challenge what ‘matter’ is.
Where sound vibrates through a system of materials, the floating ruinous landscapes of an abandoned industrial park are collaged through video projections. These create vibrant matter, as Jane Bennett termed it, imbued with a spectral quality. The hauntology of sound waves, translucent images on the wall, and video projections inhabit the gallery space and create connections through language, text, handmade pigments on translucent image-screens.
Victoria’s photographs and videos look at the human and mineral residues of spaces that have slowly disappeared, eroded or become uninhabitable. The traces of their chemical, material residue survive as ruins and recordings – ‘stone tapes’ – memory matter that resides in the material itself. They haunt the gallery with images that hover and overlap with otherworldly colours, toxic, yet alluring- sirens in the inhospitable landscape.
Joao tunes into a frequency – one where the complex vibrations of sound waves subvert meaning, creating an utilitarian architecture of high-tension geometries, signalled by a sequence of piano wires – adaptors and transmitters of an oscillating narrative.
Transmission, disruption and reception – the ongoing loop where misunderstanding gives birth to possibility, another door opened to the dri[ing listener of delayed sounds: aluminium tubes and rippled steel echoing something we know too well.
The retro-futuristic hum of malfunctioning systems, repeated signals, warnings of tragic clichés and ancient prophecies. Stories that haunt us, and vibrate with uncanny familiarity as spectral matters.
The installation is called GROUNDING (2021)It is made up of 12 large scale photo etchings, ground rock pigment, two C-type photographic prints, articulated and supported on wooden stilts
This installation piece brings together a series of image-objects that challenge our fragmented relationship to the landscape, using handmade photographic pieces and printmaking techniques to do so. In this way Victoria explores the tactile nature of these processes and brings elements of the landscape into the space of the gallery- inks are imbued with ground minerals from the places they allude to as the photographic plates are exposed and developed in situ, and in the studio.
‘Grounding’ (2021) is an imagined response to the Anthropocene and our relationship with natural formations that exceed our ability to comprehend space and time. They are fragmented and etched images of deep time geological formations, caves, coastal rock formations and mountains both on the South West coast of the UK and in the Altiplano in the Andes in South America, where Victoria grew up. Both places were in part formed 145 million years ago, during the Jurassic period: one into a mountain range, the other into an eroding coast line- yet both denote boundaries, liminal spaces at the margins of maps, where, by exposing ‘deep time’, archaeologists, paleontologists and geologists uncover the earth’s history. Victoria spent the last few years travelling to these precarious places, creating prints and collecting photographic images and mineral pigments, to use in this installation. The images allude to the peaks and troughs of the disappearing and changing landscapes and depict the process of using the minerals collected there: the iron ore, red mudstone, chalk, shale, and the dark blacks of the inking up process, as a tool to print and frottage the surface of the image. They play with notions of the impossibility of taking in the sublime view- the way we remember or encounter these spaces in smaller fragments, often through a screen. Much like our memories, they stimulate stories, narratives and myths over time. Victoria feels a responsibility to expose these narratives and to maintain an intimate relationship to nature, one that does not contribute to our ecological demise, but finds alternative and sustainable non toxic print methods to create images of landscapes that are in the process of erosion. This installation then becomes a memorial and witness to our estrangement from nature and a material reminder of where we come from. The mineral powders leave marks on her hands, just as the marks on her fingers are left on the surface of the prints, leaving a forensic trace of her encounter with these spaces of deep time. It is a recognition of the transient, the fragmented- giving nature itself agency and the voice to visualize the layers of history it preserves in its microscopic wake.
La Poste Rodier, rue Louise-Emilie de la Tour d’Auvergne
Representing La biennale de l’image Tangible, as part of 21 Photography Festivals, Reseau_lux is a network of photography forums that come together in the old post office in the 9th arrondissment of Paris during Paris Photo. This opportunity is thanks to Dominique Clerc and Francois Ronsiaux who invited me to a solo presentation as part of this innovative large scale exhibition.
Vestiges of the Unearthed (2024) incuding 6 pigment prints, projected film, photoetchings, and polaroids
Mine (2024) Photogravures, rock pigments, iron oxide and pyrite, painted baton
WITHOUT HORIZON, WITHOUT SHORE, Lambeth County Court SE11 4DZ
@geographies_of_print
with Victoria Ahrens, Carol Wyss, Victoria Arney
Hypnos and the Dissolution Process (2021)
6 monitor video collage installation, sculptured book pieces, photoetchings on stilt supports and photographs with hand applied rock pigment
In Greek mythology, Hypnos, the god of sleep, lived in a cave at the base of the river Lethe (Forgetfulness), a place where night and day meet. In this multichannel video installation, moving and still images merge in a hypnotic and mesmerizing scene. They overlap and dissolve, revealing and obscuring the rocky sea caves and coastlines of the South West of the UK and the mountain ranges of the Altiplano in South America. Both geological landscapes belong in parts to the Jurassic age, 145 million years ago, united by the rock formations of deep time deposits. Victoria spent the last few years travelling to these precarious places, creating films and collecting photographic images and mineral pigments, to use in this installation. Her works, both photographic and filmic depict the processes of using the rocks, amongst them: shale, chalk, iron oxide deposits, pink granite, mudstone and yellow sandstone as a tool to draw and frottage the surface of the photographic image, drawing on histories of colour photography and the loss of touch that the digital implies. Her hand, blue, with the inverted colours of touched negatives, detail the sensual and embodied process of hand pigmenting her images, a mediation of surfaces. Each screen, adds a layer of strata to the installation, with minimal sounds of the sea, the rocks being rubbed together and the action of her hand placing and rubbing the pigments onto the photographic surface. At times, these merging screens, dissolve the differences between the still and the moving, instead inviting the viewer to a soporiphic, and otherworldly encounter with landscapes that are in the process of slow change. These are landscapes where the human and mineral collide, where histories of art, markmaking, the cavernous and the underworld collapse, in a close observation of the surface and depth of these rock formations. Caves as underlands express those inner and hidden crevices of our mind, of death and burial, as well as myth and intrigue: places that refract and reflect light, places where night and day meet, places we forget are there. Constantly evolving, looping, the video installation reminds us of our incidental place in the world, our bones formed of the same minerals that we overlook in the natural world. These are dreamscapes, yet real places that conjur a liminal dialogue through time- deep time, the unfathomable time span of geology, as well as the accelerated viewing of the digital world in the Anthropocene, where our experience of the natural world is often through the screen. As we descend into the dreamscape are we forgetting the sense of real touch and the significance of the weight of our ecological histories?
video projection, Hypnos and the Dissolution Process (2021), looped collage of still and moving images, inverted colours (16:9, 14′ 08 mins)
VIDEOS
Exogene (2021) Photographic C-type print on copy paper, hand pigmented with sandstone, and photo etching on wooden stilt supports
No Thanks to us (2022) video projection on found screens, gallery at PADA, Barreiro Portugal
Despite it all (2022) Photograph on vegetal paper, projected collaged moving image, 4 mins 68” looped, wooden batons
Nostal-dia (2022) black and white photographs on vegetal paper, projection of moving image, slowing alternating from side to side, red and transparent, 6 mins 26 ” looped, found wood, painted frames
Working in the industrial site, CUF, an important part of the chemical and textile industry in Portugal from the 1800s to the early twentieth century, the residency offered me an insight into a utopian vision of labour and progress and the legacy of this history in the toxic landscapes left behind. Barreiro, on the other side of the river Tejo from Lisbon, is full of the abandoned ruins of this history, while also maintaining a thriving manufacturing and chemical sector that still operates today, against the backdrop of an apocalyptic stretch of unusable land, where reds, purples, greens and pinks, the residue or caput mortem of this early industrial processes (such as evaporation pools for the production of sulphuric acid) remain. Pyrite was mined in the central belt of Portugal and Spain (and still is in the Iberian pyrite belt) and brought here to extract its precious minerals. The etymology of the work ‘pyrite’ comes from the Greek ‘pyrites lithos’, meaning a stone or mineral which strikes fire. It is hot here, forest fires break out in the south, materials are melting. It is used for its sulphur and iron oxides which are used to make fertilisers, among many other things. At the turn of the century it was also used in the textile and copperas industry, and as a source of ignition for early firearms. More recently it is being used to make solar panels. It is in part highly toxic as it contains traces of arsenic, which means there are areas that are out of bounds to human habitation until decontaminated. Often called ‘fool’s gold’ for its gold like appearance or shine, it has, in fact, been found to contain small particles of actual gold, but these are very difficult to extract. It is, therefore, what is called a coupled substitution- equally desirable and toxic, useful and destructive. These photographic film stills, projections, object images and photographs, contain traces of caput mortum (the residual dust from the chemical sublimation of pyrite and iron oxides) found at the industrial park here in Barreiro- dark red, purple earthy particles that coat the landscapes of the industrial site. I am looking to work with these traces of ecological and extractivist history at the site, while alluding to the journey across land and sea in a film I made during my four day trip to get here sustainably. Drawing on Derek Jarman’s early experimental films, particularly Journey to Avebury (1971) in which he journeys through a fragmented and saturated landscape to the standing stones, I also use saturated colours and textures, and collage images one to the other, with minimal sound, to convey the juxtapositions of movement and journeying through these landscapes- in this case the film depicts, rather than a sacred ring of standing rocks as Jarman’s does, an abandoned, ruined architectural fragment that alludes to the tempestuous history of industrial landscapes of Barreiro. I project these moving images onto still photographs, to question our encounter and create a space where the spectral and the still meet on the surface of the image.
Through Rose Tinted Glasses (2022) photographic images, collaged projected moving image 5 mins 38′ looped , wooden batonsPalmera (2022) Photographic collage on vegetal paper, hand made frame, concrete breeze block
Baton Rouge (2022) Polaroids supported by painted batons, various found supports
Caput Mortuum (2022) Polaroid emulsion lift onto found rocks from the industrial site at Barreiro, wooden shelf
These polaroid images I first took of the ruins of the industrial site at Barreiro are then subjected to a process of polaroid lift emulsion. This is where using gentle techniques with a small brush in water, the emulsion is slowly teased off the backing plastic and then lifted, delicately onto found rocks from the site itself. In this way I am returning the image to the substance it is representing, creating a three dimensional imprint of the place, that is portable, small, and intimate.
Vestiges of the Unearthed opnar þann 15. júní// Vestiges of the Unearthed opens on the 15th of June
Artist: Victoria Ahrens
Kannski invites you to ‘Vestiges of the Unearthed’, the first exhibition of Victoria Ahrens’ expanded-photographic work in Reykjavik, Iceland.
The image-objects in the exhibition are shaped bythe pigments of abandoned industrial sites, and our encounter with photography in situ; yellow, pink and orange from the rock pigments of the South West coasts of the UK; greens and blues from the copper fields of the Atacama desert, purples and pinks from the sublimation of pyrite from the post-industrial landscapes of CUF in Barreiro, Portugal.
These three locations are where the tangible remains of our often hidden violent extractivist history reside, as well as the unspoken colonial and gendered landscapes of industry. These particular stone-bound metals are used in the photographic process, aluminum for polaroid strips, lithium to power our computers and phones, copper for the plates exposed to create the images in Ahrens’ displays.
Among the tinted works are photographs of the few succulents and plants that still grow in these highly toxic environments, offering a sense of potential, even hope, amid the revelations of what our images record and cost. The works remind us of our hand in shaping both our world, and our view of it in the silent, saturated and queer space of landscape, amid the ruins of our time.
Gallery Kannski Reykjavik, Iceland 15.06.24-23.06.24 Pv: 15th June …………………
The spectral and the still meet on the surface of the image,
as I journey by land, walking in the heat of the sun,
over mountains, coastlines and flatlands
Walking as an acitivity of the mind,
thinking about the activity on the land
It reminds me of the heat on the Altiplano,
where the lithium fields colour the landscapes of salt and flamingos
Here, I look up to the volcanoes
and imagine the flight of the condor
I look down at my feet, salt crackling under foot, sharp
Am I wearing the right clothes?
I’m burning as I take my photographs
Aware that this place is merciless in the midday sun
And that the caput mortum is a little toxic in my hand
I pick up the rocks, and take them back to the studio
I am sweaty and feel the need to sit in a quiet place
while I figure out how to combine these images
Frottaging the surface of the image, I find my way to the edges
I leave my DNA on the surface, my fingerprints all but visible
Here is where we meet, earth, rock, image and me.
Vestiges, remains, residue, traces of our deep encounters
Imagined combinations that hypnotise and give me solace.
Vestiges of the Unearthed
Vestiges of the Unearthed maps our relationship to the disappearing or reshaping of the landscape through anthropocentric interventions and fragmented Extractivist histories.
Made in situ in a partially abandoned industrial site in Portugal, these photographs draw on histories of the Iberian Pyrite belt, the Jurassic coast, and the Altiplano of the Andes.
These images offer a fragmented view of places of abandon and histories of extraction, tinged with the caput mortum of the left-over residues of the mining industry.
From mountains, flatlands, coastlines to waterfalls, they speak of disappearing cartographies, of boundaries, margins and the graveyard of the industrial revolution, while embodying the solace of a cyclical, hypnotic return to the earth.
Using coloured filters, made with collected rock pigments, the collaged film stills knit together these disparate places to create a single view.
A journey across land and water, only to find the ruins of our human intervention tinted with a reddish pink pellicule on these weathered relics of other times
Only shrubs and ground palms thrive in the heat of the sun, and the dry scorched earth.
MY LONDON, PHOTO LONDON SUPPLEMENT, Financial Times Weekend Magazine, 4th May 2024, to accompany PHOTO LONDON at Somerset House
In Chumleigh Gardens, in a quiet corner of Camberwell in London, palm tree fronds shade an intricately tiled pond, its geometric forms recalling Moorish and Islamic design. The garden is a hidden oasis created in 1995 to reflect the multiculturalism of its local inhabitants. Nearby stand the ruins of a 19th century limestone kiln, which was used to smelt chalk into quicklime to light London’s theatres before the invention of electricity. Both chalk and palm trees are close to my heart, both appearing in the fossil record of the Cretaceous period. I grew up among palm lined plazas and gardens in Buenos Aires, and from time to time would fly to the UK to visit my family in Dorset, where chalk and shale are commonly found among the fossils of the Jurassic coast. Here, I have brought my photographs of the palm trees of Chumleigh Gardens together with silver-gelatin prints made by my grandfather, migrant to Argentina at the turn of the century. He was fascinated by these landscaped gardens and squares, such as Plaza Independencia in Montivideo, which commemorated independence from Spanish colonial powers, and that he would travel to for work. He would often take curious self-portraits with his Leica camera, in front of the palm trees. These attest to a kind of kinship he felt to these gentle giants: both tall, alien species in a new land. He would often title these images: ‘The palm tree and I’ in his photographic albums. They were ornamental and had only recently been added to the beautifully designed gardens of Buenos Aires. Here, I have used chalk from the south west coasts to frottage onto this collage of his photographic images, an amalgamation of my images of Chumleigh gardens’ palm trees, and his, leaving my fingerprints, my DNA, on the corners of the image. In this way, I am creating a haptic dialogue with my grandfather, as well as a record of my encounter with the landscapes of deep time.
Geographies of Print, Victoria Ahrens, Carol Wyss and Victoria Arney
The notion of a static view of nature is one deeply rooted in a nostalgia for the everlasting; for contemplation in a world where the imperceptible ebb and flow creates a sense of timelessness and of the eternal. The exhibition Without Horizon, without shore offers a contemplative view of the organic threads that connect us- giving voice to our encounter with deep time, and the intrinsic fluidity and melody of the landscapes we inhabit, both internal and external. These are depictions and sounds beyond visible shores, static horizons. The fragments and mineral particles of this experience retain indelible marks; marks that serve to capture a haptic sense of ourselves and our surroundings- touching, quite literally- on the liminal spaces or connective threads that bind us. In a shifting landscape both metaphorical and actual, where our relationship to our environment captures our attention more than ever, these ephemeral traces of our physical experiences compel us to find new ways to embody them.
Here three artists all working with print, drawing, and mark making as a sculptural and physical embodiment of this fluctuating relationship, look to interrupt the flattened forms of digital existence and bring back a sense of time through touch. Thestilled images, the paper, are activated in the space of the gallery through installation pieces, sound and object images that shape how we view the work. They are looking for a language between movement, flux and stillness, between flux and stillness, to bring these Duchampian infra-mince fragments together once more. The artists as witnesses to the vibrations of time, articulate the fragile and the internal, and by unpeeling, unravelling these trajectories of their embodied cognition of these landscapes, give them a voice.
Folds and Faults (la mer) (2024) Projected collage onto three photo etching prints
Using photo etchings, pigment prints and sculptural image- objects, her work explores our imagined encounter with distant places: often mountains, lakes, cliffs and eroded coastlines in order to see what is beyond the map. Working with marginal spaces, where the mineral and human collide, often places used to delineate and demarcate the edges of cartographic drawings, she is looking to question our relationship with landscapes of erosion and disappearance- places that hold and depict ‘deep time’- geological, historic or cartographic time. Her material printed objects are created in situ, imbuing them with the minerals and particles of the place itself.
In this series of prints and print objects, Rose Tinted (Deep Time), Ahrens has been further motivated to explore these natural environments as a way of understanding that which stands still, yet still changes, often imperceptibly. Using imagined combinations of photographic images, rock pigments, coloured filters and sculptural forms, these combinations create impossible relationships between distance and nearness- what is in reach, tactile, mobile- and that which is unfathomable, beyond our reach and longed for. The outside has come inside, at a time when the outside, and far away can only be interiorized and imagined. Performative modes and sculptural installations are part of her response to this.
Made in situ at Barreiro’s abandonned industrial site, as well as along the Pyrite belt and coastlines of Portugal, South West Dorset and the Altiplano of the Andes, these pieces offer a fragmented view of places of extractivist histories and abandon, tinged with the mineral caput mortum of the left over residues of the mining industry. From mountains, flatlands, coastlines to waterfalls, they create their own immersive landscapes that speak of disappearing cartographies of historic boundaries, of the graveyard of the industrial revolution, and the solace of a cyclical, hypnotic return to the earth. Using coloured filters, made with collected rock pigments, the projected collaged films knit together these disparate places to create a single view of a journey across land and water, only to find the ruins of our human intervention tinted with a rose pellicule on these weathered solitary lands.
Rose Tinted (2024)
Projected film collage, caput mortum filter
Unconformity_i (2024) Photo etchings, pigment print on Fabriano paper, rolls
Stone Run (outline) (2024) Wooden articulated sculpture, photograph on vegetal paper
Unconformity_ii (2024) Photographic pigment print from analogue print made in situ, wooden baton, print of the Andes
Photo 50 was curated this year by REVOLV COLLECTIVE with the title
Grafting: The Land and the Artist
Revolv Collective presented Grafting: The Land and the Artist at Photo50, London Art Fair, 2024. Centred in expanded photographic practice, the collection of works by early and mid-career artists will explore the subject of labour and its diverse representations within the context of the land. In the exhibition, labour will be contextualised from a variety of positions to question our understanding and engagement with the land as a site of work, resistance, action, co-dependence, regeneration and communion. Echoing the horticultural technique whereby two plants are joined in order to grow together, these artists propose an ethos of entanglement, a space for contemplation and learning about the world, its complex systems and ecologies. The accompanying talks programme, Grafting, expanded the exhibition, highlighting process, materiality, sustainability, pedagogy, as modalities of labour within artistic practices borne through the land.
2024 Participating Artists
Alice Cazenave | Edd Carr | Eugénie Shinkle | Hannah Fletcher | Jackson Whitefield | Joshua Bilton | Kiluanji Kia Henda | MADEYOULOOK (Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho) | Marie Smith | Rahima Gambo | Rowan Lear | Tamsin Green | Victoria Ahrens
In this series The Light Between Us (Vestiges of the Unearthed) Victoria is exploring notions of memory and our encounters with the landscapes of the Anthropocene in her photographic images of Deep Time geology. The analogue photographs and projections refer to the Jurassic coast and her childhood memories of the place, while toxic colours pervade the surface reminding the viewer of the contemporary relationship of these landscapes to manmade pollution and climate change. The photogravures work with the Coomeenatrush waterfall, where some of the earliest human boat constructions were found buried at its source, and where the waters wash away the memories of migration and immigrations from Ireland to the wider world during the Famine years. Victoria’s ancestors went to Argentina from Ireland, travelling by boat to these foreign lands, where she grew up. The geological formations of both the Altiplano in Argentina and the Jurassic coasts are being eroded by mining and landslides due to human activity, not least to find the precious rocks and minerals that are used to power batteries, that make digital photography and darkroom chemistry possible.
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Dans cette série The Light Between Us (Vestiges of the Unearthed), Victoria explore les notions de mémoire et nos rencontres avec les paysages de l’Anthropocène dans ses images photographiques de la géologie des Temps Profonds. Les photographies et projections analogiques font référence à la côte jurassique et aux souvenirs d’enfance de ce lieu, tandis que des couleurs toxiques imprègnent la surface, rappelant au spectateur la relation contemporaine de ces paysages avec la pollution d’origine humaine et le changement climatique. Les photogravures fonctionnent avec la cascade de Coomeenatrush, où certaines des premières constructions de bateaux humains ont été retrouvées enterrées à sa source, et où les eaux effacent les souvenirs de migration et d’immigration de l’Irlande vers le reste du monde pendant les années de famine. Les ancêtres de Victoria sont partis d’Irlande pour l’Argentine, voyageant en bateau vers ces terres étrangères où elle a grandi. Les formations géologiques de l’Altiplano en Argentine et des côtes du Jurassique sont érodées par l’exploitation minière et les glissements de terrain dus à l’activité humaine, notamment pour trouver les roches et les minéraux précieux qui sont utilisés pour alimenter les batteries, qui rendent possibles la photographie numérique et la chimie en chambre noire.
Victoria Ahrens, Vestiges of the Unearthed (2023) Analogue photographs, pigment prints, wooden structure, projected film (La Mer(ma)
SANS HORIZON, SANS RIVAGE, La Ciotat
This small coastal city in the south of Provence, near Marseille, is considered to be the birthplace of cinema. It is where the Lumiere brothers, pioneers of early cinema, are said to have shot some of the first films (at the station, the sprinkler sprinkled etc)” in 1896, and where they first projected their collection of short films to a large paying audience at the Eden theatre- the oldest continuously working cinema in the world.
We were invited to create an exhibition of large scale works for the Chapelle des Penitents Blues, a huge empty chapel with a long history at La Ciotat.
Here I installed three large scale analogue images, pigment prints 1.6 m x 1.1 m each, on a wooden structure, with a projected film of the sea, hand coloured pigment prints and a series of black and white photo etchings- the film projected onto the large scale film photographs used hand tinted filters in pink, orange and red hues- taken from the rock minerals in situ, where these images were exposed snd developed. This film is an homage to one of the 40 films the Lumiere brothers created: a 54 second moving image piece of the sea called simply La Mer (1895). The images of ragged coastlines, recall the eroding cliffs of both south west Britain and Brittany- with the changing hues of the sea creating a toxic yet soothing palette. This serves as a reminder of our rose tinted relationship to places of the past, of the nostalgia of summer holidays by the sea. Yet, they are tarnished with unnatural colours, the colours of toxic residue spilt or left on coastlines as chemicals from historic mining or fertilisers seep into the fissures and troughs, creating toxic luminescence in the sea and on the film itself.
Protest of the waters (2023) shows 25 photo etchings of the Coomeenatrush waterfalls. In West Cork- at the base of which, in a bog lake, the earliest boat like structure has been found – taken out at first to date it snd study it, it could not be preserved outside the bog itself, where it has now been laid to rest All of these pieces refer to the hidden, invisible and ephemeral encounters with landscapes of change- where the increasing activity of humans means the loss of bird habitat, song snd language and with it our ancestral histories. Without Horizon, without shore- the title is coined from a phrase by Monet as he painted his final water Lilly paintings- 100 years ago, upon his death, given to the French state on Armistice day.
Performance by Benedicte Lelay in front of my projected film
Benedicte Lelay produced a 20 minute live performance piece in response to the large installations and film recreating monstrous bodyscapes to interact with the violence of climate change and our baggage and detritus as humans.
The Pencil of Nature (2023) Hand pigmented black and white photograph, wooden baton support, 210 cm (h) x 110 cm
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Carol Wyss architectural construction of paper cubes, each depicting a human bone protrudes into the gallery space- both a place to immerse yourself inside its walls or to look through it onto the landscapes in the rest of the chapel- perp holes between the bone mausoleum. Victoria Arney’s illuminated bird scripts printed on Japanese paper, recall the earliest known language and song before humans existed, and allude to the illuminated manuscripts of religious texts.
Residency at Uillin, West Cork Arts Centre, Skibereen, Ireland
Castle island, Lough Hyne (2023) Night photograph, bioluminescent kayak
Where film and photography have always dealt with the tension between the haptic surface and the optic illusion, so the recorded marks of deep time reside in both the crevices and fissures of ecological landscapes, where particles are held in suspension for millions of years, and resilient species of plants feather the surface. It is in these places, often abandoned, marginal, rural or post-industrial, that the folds and layers of the Anthropocene can be recognised, brought to the surface by erosion, ruin or residues that reveal their human impact. My work is concerned with the site of ecological and geological remoteness, in places where the solitude and quietness of the landscape can reveal or develop a new way of looking and listening. These landscapes are contingent on political, cultural, geological and ecological experiences, and are places in which I develop non-toxic photographic plates, sound recordings and experimental films that explore our encounter with that which is beyond the immediately visible. As part of this residency, I am looking to explore the coastlines and trails to the ruins of the megalithic dolmens, to make an experimental film piece, photographic images and sound recordings that capture our encounter with these sacred spaces, while collecting rock pigments and grasses to create a second skin, or forensic pellicule on the surface of the image. Immersing myself in the landscape, I will draw on the bioluminescence of Lough Hyne, which speaks of the invisible made visible, to explore the traces we leave behind, and our estrangement from the natural world. Growing up in Argentina, in landscapes that are vast and unfathomable, with ancestors who came over from Ireland at the turn of the 19th century, I am looking to retrace that journey back, to a small extent, by communing with these landscapes, and translate this experience using durational film practices.
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Coomeetrush (the Secret) (2023)
Since starting the residency, I have been taking time to read about the famine history here in Skibereen which was among the worst affected regions of Ireland. The potato crop, creates a circular discourse: the potato was first domesticated in Peru, near Lake titikaca in pre Incan times. After the Spanish conquest, potato tubers, tomatos and corn were taken back to Spain and later to other parts of Europe as part of the Great Colombian Exchange (plunder might be a better word). In turn, the potato became the staple diet of Irelan, grown everywhere and useful as a source of food, that couldn’t be taken easily in times of war (as it grew underground). Where it became the monoculture, and a homogenized genetic strain was encouraged, when the blight hit Ireland, carried on an infected seedling, it easily spread and decimated the crop. This provoked the death of millions from starvation, hypothermia and disease in the 19th century. Those that survived, found a way out- emigration to the New World. Among them, my great great grandparents. Most sailed to the United States, but some thousands went to Argentina- which is how, in the end, I ended up growing up there. The potato that came from South America, by a twist of fate, ended up being the reason (or one of the reasons) why I grew up there. In Lough Hyne, the first marine protected lake in Europe, with its unique biodiversity and bioluminescent algae (the only lake in Europe to have bioluminescence), the light is activated by movement in the water- this leaves traces of blue sparkles, just as these traces of DNA, all but invisible, draw me back to these ancestral landscapes.
The Light Between Us (2023) Photographic c type prints, wooden batons, projected film, looped
Organised by Dr. Sharon Young, artist, writer and academic in relation to the Bigger Book Fair and the publication Mutterings, from a collection of writings and artists’ work, which I am a part of.
The book contains work, The Lost Exploitation Journals, with my photo etchings and a creative writing piece on Extractivism. For Peckham 24 I reworked the images and others from my video piece, Rose tinted, into a small zine publication, and wrote a performative piece. This is to be performed alongside a work of prose that I recorded, so that the two voices echo, repeat and interrupt each other across the space.
In addition, I had a small scale version of Vestiges of the Unearthed projected onto two photo etchings of the Altiplano of the Andes using pink stone pigment collected in situ, and two of the Mine Me photo etchings of my hands holding the raw rock pigments.
Vestiges of the Unearthed, a performance reading, sound recording, voice, photo etchings and video projection
The zines are an edition of 25, using rock paper, laser copies, and written text
this film commissioned in 2021 by the Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck School of Art is currently on show as part of On Seeing: Perception in Performance and Film as part of Arts Week, part of a live performance by Danai Miliaraki,
Noli Mi Tangere (3022) Film with sound, echoes of audio description, performance at Birkbeck School of Art
Video and Discussion commissioned by the Peltz Gallery, Birkebeck College, University of London
This video collage is an exploration of the aesthetics of touch, its seductive sounds and our relationship to surface in art. In the increasingly sanitized conditions we live in, our heightened experience of touch and sound can be seen as a transgression, a new taboo. The video, Noli Mi Tangere, looks to question the known relationship of the artist to touch (don’t touch the artworks), to mark-making as the ultimate site of touch- to create an affective resonance with the seductive surfaces of the handmade, and its significance as a transgressive moment. By working chalk and shale collected on the south coast into her photographic surfaces that were exposed and developed in situ, layers of million-year-old shell debris forms a new pellicule on the surface of the print. By enacting the encounter with the landscape, the printed object establishes a new site of touch, and reinforces our relationship to the spaces we inhabit through the tactile qualities of the materials. Just as Giotto always included a disembodied had in his work (Arena Chapel), so this video piece creates interactions between an extraneous hand and marks made on the surface of the photographic and printed objects. In this way, it refers to the loss of touch the pandemic has fueled and the persistent doubts we are left with. Like Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas, the surface is prodded, touched, scratched and penetrated as an affirmation of presence. Noli mi Tangere becomes a space to contemplate the movement of the hand across, inside and within the artwork, and marks a moment of transgression and desire for that which we have lost, both in terms of our bodily encounters and the landscapes we are increasingly estranged from.
The Fall out (2023) Photographic Print on Japanese Kozo paper, photograph as etching, handmade book cover, wooden support structure 122 cm x 200 cm (h)
The waterfall symbolises a sense of letting go, of cleansing and continuous flow of life. It rains water in cascades as rivers flow over resistant bedrock, falling off steep drops, creating a microclimate that is still not well understood. They have often been considered the first ‘tourist’ sites, the first photographed landscapes, such as Niagara Falls or Victoria Falls- named after colonial visitors, their indigenous names often overlooked. Here the disappearance of the Guairá Falls is depicted. They have now disappeared, only a distant memory. Explosives were used to blow them up by the Brazilian military in the 1980s to make way for the Itaipú dam- the largest in the world until the Three Gorges Dam in China was built many years later. The Guairá Falls were once one of the wonders of the natural world but are now part of the oral and visual history of the place. This large-scale photographic piece imperfectly records and translates a found image of the falls, becoming a faded version, abstracted in inks, pixels and chemicals. Like our own memories, the grey tones act to prompt recollections, and are given agency only in the hidden stories they can tell. The language of memory and photography is so intertwined that the textures of these tones remind us only of what is absent.
These Structures can be articulated and free standing or leant/placed one in front of the other- or, alternatively, only one or other used in the installation. The photo gravure on the right juxtaposes the image of the Falls with the coastline of the UK, and its small-scale waterfall at Chapman’s pool after the rains. Made in situ, using rock pigments from the place itself.
Microsoft Word – VICTORIA AHRENS_CentreforBritishPhotography_2023.docx
Overlap, Mine is Yours (2023) Three TV monitors, three video pieces of still images, that overlap and loop 110 cm (h) x 90 cm Free standing
This installation piece is made up of three video collages of still images that interweave and overlap on the screens. They depict images of the Altiplano in South America, where volcanos and mountains relate to the origins of the earth, with the eroded coastlines of the South West of the UK. They share a cretaceous and Jurassic past, and these otherworldly looped pieces, create poetic encounters between bodies of earth that would once have been part of a single land mass. The piece is a commentary on the Anthropocene and the discourses that divide us. Our encounters with landscapes of disappearance and change are often precarious. We are estranged from the spaces that make us, places where the mineral and human collide. These are also places where the minerals used in mining for the photographic industry come from- the aluminium of polaroid strips, the lithium for batteries and bits for computers and digital cameras; the iron ore, chalk, and sulphates for the development processes. These landscapes remind us the we are extracting what we need from them with only the illusory image of their forms to give back: the photographic fragments, taken from the world, are then projected back onto it through screens and monitors, as memorials of that which is disappearing.
Our desire for beautiful gemstones belies the problematics of their extraction, often environmental or unethically sourced, yet part of a culture of value that goes back thousands of years – the Ancient Egyptians adorned themselves with lapis lazuli, the Mayans used turquoise. Now these stones are becoming rarer and more difficult to mine, as mines close down or internal conflict in Afghanistan or the Congo for example, mean conditions for extraction become more precarious. Formed millions of years ago from the compression of minerals and gases, often under hydrothermal action in rock, these jewels also represent a system of belief, ritual and healing. Turquoise as a healing stone, is thought of bringing tranquility, and protection to the wearer; Lapis Lazuli, strength and courage; Rose Quartz, unconditional love. Just as photography is dependent on mineral histories, and a sense the we (at least until recently) ‘believe’ in the image, and its ability to freeze time, so these gems remind us that we are holding deep time in our hands, and a contested history of value, adornment and excavation.
She Speaks Up! 228 Chingford Mount Road, E4 8JL
1-19th Nov, 8th Nov performances
curated and organised by Sharon Young
Participating artists: Victoria Ahrens, Alice Butler and Gemma Blackshaw with the Dengie Hundred, Hannah Clarkson, Marysa Dowling, Alice Gale Feeny, Adriana Jaros, Nicole Lacey, Rachel Lyons, Nadege Meriau, Liz Murrey, Catherine Morland, Liz Orton, Charan Singh, Sharon Young and Eliza Zmuda
Copperas (2022) Photo etching plate, iron ore pigments, inks, exposed to the elementsGreen Vitriol (2022)- photo etching plate, inks, pigments, exposed to the elements, installation
The Alum Chine is the name of a pathway through the Westbourne pine forests to the beaches on the other side. ‘Chine’ meaning ravine where water once flowed, and ‘alum’ because it is the place where the first chemical works existed in Britain- to extract, manufacture and mine alum and copperas or green vitriol used to fix the colours and tan the leather with a black dye, used in the textile and dyeing industry in Dorset in the late 16th century. However, by the mid 17th century mining had ceased due to the fact that it became increasingly uneconomical to extract the deposits. This story of the earliest mineral and chemical manufacturing in the UK has been all but lost to history. These days, ferrous sulphate (copperas) is used to treat anaemia-something I have suffered from and have to take. These pine trees grow tall and strong on the iron rich deposits left where alum and copperas were first extracted, as trees (that can also suffer from iron deficiency) need iron to produce chlorophyll- the pigments and processes used in these photo etchings, explore the colour and chemical industry, and echo the histories of the place as the image is ‘fixed’ and pigmented with green/ blue inks and hand made pigments (created from collected stone and earth from the alum chine itself). The inked photo etching plates are used as outcomes as well as printing matrices. They will eventually fade if left out in the light for prolonged periods, much like our forests which are rapidly disappearing around us. Aluminium, or alum, extracted on this site, is used in polaroid strips, in these polymer plates and in salts to treat human afflictions as well as plant afflictions. They remind me of our place in the world and the anthropocenic layers we are creating for posterity, in the midst of a rapidly changing environmental crisis. These places can always renew themselves, and adapt to new conditions, even perhaps recover. The question is, can we?
BEYOND SILVER, at the HIVE, Birmingham, opening 18/01-03/02/23
curated by @londonaltphoto- Melanie King, Hannah Fletcher, Oliver Raymond Barker and Martha Gray.
Metals and minerals are of the earth- extracted, purified, dried, cut, moulded, extruded, dissolved and filtered. Photographic images are of the earth, they are metals and minerals, polished, coated, sensitised, exposed, developed, washed, fixed, displayed. We rely on the sensitivity of these metals to depict the world around us, the earth that they come from.
Silver has taken a leading role in this history – it is a history of colonisation, extraction, and depiction. From Louis Daguerre’s Daguerrotypes to Henry Fox Talbot’s callotypes in the 1800s, to today’s digital Chromogenic prints – silver is seen as unbeatable when it comes to making a quality, archivable photographic image. However, silver is not the only metal used for image making.
The London Alternative Photography Collective presents ‘Beyond Silver’, an exhibition that explores the relationship between analogue photography and metallurgy. The exhibition will consider the use of silver in photography, as well as shining a light on many of the other metals that are used within photographic image production, in both historical and contemporary practice. In addition to silver, the exhibition will include works which utilise lesser known metals in photography including iron, copper, tin, aluminium, platinum and palladium.
‘A stone tape is a material object that has “recorded” the energy of a past event. Widely popularized by British author Nigel Kneale in his 1972 teleplay The Stone Tape, beliefs in the recording ability of objects and environments span the practices of heritage preservation, paranormal investigation, sound and media theory, and spiritual pilgrimage. But if materials do, in fact, record the past, how do contemporary encounters act as instances of playback?’ (Center for Documentary Art)
I am using my family archive of slide film images from the 1970s to revisit and record the rocky coastlines of the south west, and then employ tactile processes to mould this encounter into the photographic prints.
Stone Tape (2022) Crumpled photographic prints on copy paper, slide projection, archival slide image 320 cm (h) x 150 cm Stone Tape (Memorial) (2022) Crumpled photographic print on copy paper, archival slide projection 150 cm x 140 cm Glacial Erratic (2022) Crumpled photographic print on copy paper, archival slide projectionResonant Cavity (2022) Crumpled photographic print on copy paper, archival slide projectionsmall publication to go with this project, hand made edition of 30
Victoria Ahrens 