The photography cycle “Montage as a cosmic principle” consists of images that join two photographs in a similar way to the physical montage of a film strip. The images bring together disparate places and moments and nevertheless suggest a sense of their interconnectedness. In this way, the never fully encompassed time and space come together in the process of the aesthetic meaning-making. Whereas the physical surface of the image joins the green of the fern with the geometrical pointiness of the reed leaves, water with the moon that controls its times, the body of a bird with a thorn, the mental process of the montage invites additional layers of associations and connections. “Montage as a cosmic principle” is thus a meditation on the editing technique as a mechanism through which to think not only about the ecological interconnectedness of the life forms that the images show but also of their poetic dimensions – of the ecology as poetics.
Early 20th century and avantgarde filmmakers recognized the potential of the montage to create meaning beyond linear storytelling – beyond the mere ‘sum’ of two images. Whereas Sergei Eisenstein explored the intellectual dimensions of editing in this regard, the American avantgarde film maker Maya Deren made a poetic practice of it. For Deren, the montage had the potential to put layers of meaning upon meaning on images. She described this as the vertical montage and contrasted it with the linear montage of storytelling. To give a visible form to something that is invisible – to an emotion, to a feeling or an association – was what defined for Deren the poetic practice of the moving image montage.
Following this notion, the layering of meanings in “Montage as a cosmic principle” purposefully aims to bring to mind organic processes of birth, growth or metamorphosis. The choice of the motifs, texture and color works to underscore the permeability of matter and shape. It is almost as if the organic life of one image desires to spill over into the other. Along the line that formally both separates and joins two images, the photographs thus ultimately propose material and metaphysical oneness of life on Earth and the invisible principles at work of the perpetual flow.
Exhibited at Photobastei (Zurich) from April 20—May 7, 2023