Studio for Propositional Cinema at Museum Abteiberg

Since its inauguration in 2013, Studio for Propositional Cinema had produced work that is likely to be described as paracinematic or paraphotographic—participating with the fabric constraints and prospects of each mediums with out essentially taking {a photograph} or making a movie. For that reason, the collective’s present solo exhibition at Museum Abteiberg, “The Digicam of Catastrophe,” presents an instantaneous shock to the viewer: a sequence of sensuous, large-format black-and-white images following three characters via post-apocalyptic land- and cityscapes. 

Opposite to facile appeals to its representational energy, informational accessibility, and democratic circulation, the collective views pictures as an extractive know-how of the economic age: a harmful artwork that sees the world as a uncooked materials on which the forces of manufacturing can act. It regularly turns into clear, in reality, that the catastrophe of the exhibition’s title refers back to the invention of pictures as a lot because it does to the medium’s extinction. If the {photograph} is a product of an more and more catastrophic modernity, how, if in any respect, can we plan for its future?

Hanging in mirrored frames on silver partitions, every {photograph} within the exhibition options textual content printed instantly on the glazing. They inform the story of a band of photographic rebels resisting the homogeneity of spectacular tradition by retaining a type of analogue image-making alive after one thing like the top of the world, right here offered as the top of the picture. “We are able to retain the opportunity of making our personal pictures,” writes the Studio, “by regaining management of the equipment of image-making, retaining manufacturing recipes and data open-source and obtainable, and constructing and sustaining networks for his or her distribution, like how illicit data was retained and handed alongside within the so-called Darkish Ages.” Intriguing vitrines full of proof of historic photographic processes—together with a digicam and numerous minerals and chemical substances—provide each proof of the medium’s previous and a self-professed survival information.

Participating within the violence of pictures and concurrently encouraging others to reclaim the method for themselves, the Studio dares to theorize the situation of all image-making at our current historic juncture. It’s one thing near: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

— Giampaolo Bianconi