WHEN I TRY TO SEE THERE’S ONLY BLUR


personal
year
2019
role

Photography

I woke up. Look at my phone. Scroll down some pictures. I see a new filter that I have never tried before. In bed, the face swollen by dreams, I change my body to look like Sailor Moon. It’s cute. I save my new changed self to my camera roll, to make company to my many other selves that are laying there, permanently forgotten. Erased from my long-distance memory. Myself, lost from myself, but in the company of myself. Representations of this shattered identity, this shattered cave that we construct everyday by the light of a led fire.

The main camera on my phone is not working anymore. Only the frontal one. Only the selfie one works.  And when I try to point it to the world, I can only see black.  There’s nothing there, only the error. And then I look at my camera. Not my phone camera. But my camera. My analog camera. The one that I use to slice and cut the world into frames. The one that seeks and feeds from representation. I look at the viewfinder, but ... when I try to see there’s only blur ... There’s no projection possible. Only blur. 

In the middle of representation, imagination and projection, I cannot find any defined line. Any recognizable edges to look up to. I can only see that nothing has any form. Everything is abstract. Every future is in constant change, redefining itself as we try to look at it. When we imagine it. Because when there’s light, there’s only the past that is visible. So I ask myself: and the future ... What about the future?  

The images of this series were created by manipulating light directly on the negatives. Normally the beginning or the end of films, those readymade images, posthumously processed and scanned to create inner worlds of light leaks, represents to me, at the core of its abstraction, the impossibility of capturing everything. The error that comes when we try to represent the future.Its organic forms and its psychedelic lights are a way to instigate our imagination. They are visions of what we cannot already see.

Those images shows the moment when you try to hold something so tight, because you cannot lost it, that you eventually break it. With the heat of your body, that broken image is going to melt. And is gonna drop. Beneath your fingers. Dripping the impossibility to hold everything.




© Miguel Soll — all rights reserved, 2022