8th edition of the European Month of Photography in Luxembourg

"ARCHIPEL"

Rozafa Elshan "Synthèse d’une excursion"
24 April – 13 June 2021
Centre d’art Dominique Lang

Marie Capesius "HELIOPOLIS – in the blue shadow of the city of the sun"
24 April – 13 June 2021
Centre d’art Nei Liicht

Marie Sommer "L’Œil et la Glace"
24 April – 29 August 2021
CNA Centre national de l'audiovisuel

À toi beaucoup t, (0000.....) 5fois infiniment fois n était exeloús. You unworked your demonstration, contained in a box and you rubbed it against the skin of this place of passage, to disorient (yourself), to measure space, a duration (with the precision of a seismograph), you attempted a more attentive form of the everyday. – This everyday exeloús, of our times.

To demonstrate, you said, by trying a whole bunch of things: the photographic trace, infinite reproduction by photocopy, the drawing out of an instant in its repetition, the distribution of time in the form of numbered tickets, the colour red, the camera viewpoint, the chance articulations of a found list of films, the vision device composed of different sized glass plates, the pacing out of a space and its constraints, the sounds of their unbecoming. To demonstrate so as to experience and inform a quest, to possibly manifest it, in a station waiting room.

(In brackets: in the station of Mr. Rail, builder of rails and trains that need not arrive anywhere and of glass palaces that collapse under the weight of exhibitions and photographs, they say that he continued to stare straight ahead, mister Rail, but nothing to be done. He really could not fathom it. Impossible. Truly, he could not see it. On which side was life.)

In the meantime, you collected little bits of paper gleaned from the books found in the Pell-Mell and handled by unknown and anonymous hands. Of these solid objects, that watch us, you held out the slim chance of an encounter, of a lingering upon a page. An erotic of unpredictable deviations from the straight line. (0000.....)

(…)the poetry of the invisible, of infinite unexpected possibilities – even the poetry of nothingness – issues from a poet who had no doubts whatever about the physical reality of the world. This atomizing of things extends also to the visible aspects of the world, and it is here that Lucretius is at his best as a poet: the little motes of dust swirling in a shaft of sunlight in a dark room (II, 114-124) (…) or the spider webs that wrap themselves around us without our noticing them as we walk along(III, 381-390).

Tuned to these experiences that hover on the edge of telling, you approached a kind of omega point where (when/as) time tips into space, the clock stopped at 11:11 and one no longer seeks to align cause and effect: It felt real, the pace was paradoxically real, bodies moving musically, barely moving, twelve-tone, things barely happening, cause and effect so drastically drawn apart that it seemed real to him, the way all the things in the physical world that we don’t understand are said to be real. (…) light and sound, wordless monotone, an intimation of life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that’s not the movies. (22)

Standing was part of the art, the standing man participates (…) But always back to the wall, in physical touch, or he might find himself doing what, he wasn't sure … (120)

These abstract moments, all form and scale, the carpet pattern, the grain of the floorboards, binding him to total alertness, eye and mind, and then the overhead shot of the landing… (119)

At the base of the wall (screen) you lay down upon the ground and with rigour, neither moving nor stretching, you tried to reach the ceiling with the help of a projection on glass. Like a writing played out infinitely on a piece of paper the size of this transit lounge: from the closed universe to the infinite world.

Text by Michela Sacchetto

Rozafa Elshan (born in Luxembourg in 1994) graduated in 2020 with a BA in Photography at ESA le 75 in Brussels. She is currently pursuing her studies at the ERG in MA Artistic Practices and Scientific Complexity in Brussels. It is through the classical apprenticeship of photography that she that she was able to quickly create a certain link with the matter of analog photography. This medium allows her to carry out a vast research on the relationship between body, space-time and uses other tools such as sculpture, drawing and performance to materialize a distance in hollow that is always mobile and changing. Her practice is inscribed above all in an ordinary everyday life that allows her to accumulate all sorts of objects to then arrange them in the form of flow in a concrete space. This discrete intervention without beginning or end, is constantly on the move to extend the perception of things. It does not designate a subject, but seeks in this artistic process to experience the effect of a becoming.