An Exhibition of the UNFRAMING PHOTOGRAPHY project
Opening on 29th April 2022.
@ The UCA Project Space - Folkestone
The Photographic Garden represents a metaphorical space of perpetual transformation in which geometric order and technological innovation are constantly frustrated and sabotaged by the chaotic forces of nature.
Each sculpture was constructed using found and recycled material (provided by the Folkestone Household Waste Recycling Centre) as well as some of the props utilised for the public interventions.
Assembled with photographic images directly printed or transferred onto the large sculptural structures, the Photographic Garden offers a chance to witness the fertile entanglement of factual and fictional and participate in the imagination of new perspectives.
The garden has been the subject of the early photographic experiments by William Fox Talbot, has since inspired many photographic projects and more recently it has been employed by Roland Barthes as a devise for the theoretical elaboration of the medium*.
In the exhibition, photography and the garden are intertwined with their paradoxical qualities: they are dirty and clean, free and disciplined, they flourish and degrade, you can escape in it but their perimeters are well defined, they blur hard labour and pure leisure, they represent the ideal consumerist paradise and a stage filled with narratives, drama and tableaux.
* I’m referring here to Roland Barthes definition of Punctum and Studium elucidated on ‘Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography’
This was the poster of the exhibition:
