vice-versa

or the story of Hércules Florence
2016

 

 

In September 2012 my mother goes to Brazil, but most of the photos from her trip came out black. Nearly one hundred and eighty years earlier - in 1833 - in a small Brazilian town of Campinas, Hércules Florence (1804-1879), long before Daguerre in France, discovers the photography when permanently manages to reproduce an image. The so-called isolated case of the discovery of photography in Brazil, remains a fact little known until today, which shows the cruel selectivity of adopted vision of the world, but also its parallelism.

Hércules Florence himself is a fascinating character who, despite the lack of publicity, does not give up in his further experiments. We can call him either an explorer, an experimenter, a scientist or an artist - he is the author of sixth architectural order, a concept of synoptic dictionary, a notion of typo-syllables, a pulvography or inimitable paper for money print and zoofonia - a system of recording birdsongs. He develops the last one when he is employed as a painter during the famous scientific journey of the Russian tsardom along the Amazon river, which is also called the Langsdorff expedition (1826-1829). Part of the crew, because of the beri-beri disease, goes mad and loses their memory. Hércules is one of the few who survives in health to the last stages of the journey, constantly documenting the reality along the way.

I lean on concepts such as parallelism, clarity, visibility. I'm working with photo paper to create objects of uncertain status between drawing, graphic art and photography. I create objects that are perseverative meaning that they contain repetitions of gestures, words, sounds, information. I also create notations, which to some extent are following the writing, but not always allow quick and unambiguous reading.

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this work was created during a three months artistic residency in Centre Culturel Le Beffroi in Paris / FR

 

curator: Piotr Szpilski

photos: Piotr Litwic