Where Do We Go Now! (On freedom)

© Nadine Fraczkowski

I look at Nadine Fraczkowski images and I see nothing! Nothing as oppose to a single thing. Nothing as a whole being of bare something. Each image (portraits taken from friends, posing as they are, or acting, or documentations of derelict social landscapes, either from the United States Marines Corps Air Ground Combat Centre, in California, at the Parisian banlieues, or in Palestine, for instance) reminds me of accidents. Those events happening unexpectedly and unintentionally, and in which its result is, normally, physical damage or physiological injuries. Specially, when we think that we are on a safe position – as safe as we could be in life. Events that just happen and we can’t remember why did they happen to us. Afterwards, we ask, where am I? Wanting to know immediately something that was unspecified or unknown until a few seconds ago.

Following its functioning somewhat something that can be denied before it happen. That is why, in our being, we never been as frightened as at those moments. In particularly, when having to choose a single thing from what is designated as the unique possible choice: white, black, or red. Free from all duplicity and deceptions it is an ingenuous form to go along in life: quickly, moving, without interruptions, away from obscene scenes that make us to interrogate something and, consequently, to question nothing. Nonetheless, the implications of choosing from the list of unique possible choices close doors. Do not open to the field of possible conditions, when we are looking for a way to go through with this series of exhibitions. A programme of exhibitions that has started with a selection of lost images recollected from flea markers to reflections on dislocated people followed by landscapes exploring elements of death and sacrifice. The manners in which those people portrayed by Fraczkowski (b. 1977, Germany) are in that they don’t know the way to relate, to build connections. They are waiting in front of a well illuminated door, standing back against a column and gazing directly to whomever passes, whereas, in the meantime, to pass the time, while waiting, they get in to an underground lifestyle, a movement or a singular form of expressing their sensations, their desires, realising their dreams. Thereafter, we came in to familiar territories of departing from the custom, from reason. Overstepping the limits and going beyond our attributed social-cultural rights. We became excessive, in whatever way, and violate the law.

© Nadine Fraczkowski

Living in a society that expects each individual to play a particular communal role reverberates in a competitive indefinitely way all throughout. Being involved in different plays – tragedy, comedy, drama – at different times, can render life invisible, or simply make life gone unnoticed, or, instead, it can be that all has been staged for us. Covering a whole spectrum of experience through what can be considered as exaggerations, extravagant violations of law, decency and morality. A whole representation happening in different locations. Within the spaces through which we move. Constantly changing movement, from here to there, from there to nowhere, and back again. In Nadine Fraczkowski’s photographs, the people being portrayed reflect individuals have that scope to act, have the freedom to operate. As already referred to, one of the freedoms is to choose a black environment, from three unique possibilities. At this moment, we, still being audience, will be wandering about, too, as they do! Even, when they are still in that state of not being subjected to or be affected by a particular undesirable single thing. It is the object of a direct experience to build sensory properties while understanding cultural landscapes from a sensory perspective. Because between what we want to represent and what is represented is a great distance, a time distance of having, possessing and being affected by; the same goes for when we think about dynamic variables, such as perspectives, perception, and discourses. So, the question is, which zone do they occupy? Which language are they speaking? To which period in human history do they referring to? And, why and what are they doing there? To comprehend those decisions, and the dynamic associated with, the audience has to enter in to the space being occupied by the people being portrayed. “From a psychoanalytic point of view”, as is defended by British psychotherapist and essayist Phillips, “other people’s excesses disturb us, get us worked up, because they reveal something important to us about ourselves, about our own fear and longing.” A reflection. Revealing our own reflection!

These wanderings about, this knowing amuse our curiosity and might have a becoming-real dimension. Instead of the acting out of things that ought to be subject to a script, in these images there is a total collusion of elements, an obscenity, as the French philosopher and cultural theorist Baudrillard would had put it. At some moments the audience wants to leave. Since we don’t feel safe, we are threatened not only on a physical dimension, but on a sensorial too by the proximity we, as society, have increasingly from things. The obscene gesture is that we are ultra-close to everything that is immediately realised. Identity-based communities, like lesbian or transgender or the Marine Corps, make a strong component in Fraczkowski’s body or work. The photographer’s subject matter occupies the same visual space, as do performers, actors, lovers, and thieves. Traditional overwhelming and excessive experience we have to go through when engaging with them – performing, acting, following in love, being robbed. Meaning, those that take or attempt to take that something, which is of value, by force or threat of force, or by putting the victim – the whole world – in fear. One of the choices is best not to get involved, not to disturb discourses or significations! The other, which is obviously foreigner, as is shown by art, is the obscenity, “capable of invention a scene other than the real, another set or rules”; while, on the other, there are still another choice which has “fallen into a kind of obscenity by becoming descriptive, objective or the pure reflection of the decomposition – the fractalization – of the world.” In a sense, black is just another name for that which is fated. Just as could have been possible to choose white, instead, or even red. Yet, which space shall we enter?

© Nadine Fraczkowski

Fraczkowski’s photographic work approaches different systems of reality, verities and orders. It asks questions about language and discourses, about context and environment. Most importantly, what is interesting is that her work is focused on the encoding-decoding-recoding communication process, or, in a different categorisation scheme, on the destructive conflictual forces existing in the author-object-audience socio-cultural environment. In one of the images, the photographer captures a woman sitting down on a black leather couch, looking at the camera passively, in what looks like to be a cherished contemporary apartment in a residential area of a major European city; while, in another image, a person sits behind a newspaper, which is illuminated by the light coming in from two large windows, on his right-hand side a plant, and around we can see an impressive array of chairs, possibly coming from different locations and times; whereas, in another photo, a young man sits composed while looking at the camera. These images can teach us to enjoy our positions and ourselves in a unique way. What we can see is that they also exercise the tyrannical impression of being juggled between real or acted situations. However, the following selected photographs, from an extensive body of work of portraits that were produced by the photographer, although dealt also in between the same situations, real or acted, have another metaphorical dimension; what is interesting here is that it allows, as Prof. Rogoff expresses, “to perceive about the dynamics and performances of ambivalences and of disavowals in public sphere culture.” This selection of images from a large body of work built by the photographer resembles more like a spiral staircase where everyone disappears.

What is so interesting with these images is that they introduce order of the most primitive kind. They teach us to play, to laugh and to have fun, to go to parties, to enjoy life. But they are also steep and dark. We don’t need to be reminded that the photographer has brought us into here, to a zone too close to the actors. Those who are portrayed are no more; they have gone to the underworld. So, these obscene figures have become like a theatre in where they do not have to betray their presence. Instead, these photos “address how culture is perceive when it is viewed from the back door or at an oblique angle, through miscomprehension and mistranslation and what it means to be in a position of culturally longing for that which is historically and politically forbidden.” We always think we know where we are. How pretentious we are! Those events happening unexpectedly and unintentionally, which I was referring to at the beginning, therefore, made me recall of ornamentations, natural reliefs painted by artists of actors in enriching costumes. Copies. Society, as a whole, doesn’t have ideas of its own, and those that represent the authority state don’t want us to have them. Authorities don’t trust artists because they are talented at copying. In fact, they expect us to be lazy. Not to play, to laugh and to have fun, to go to parties, to enjoy life, in summary, to be obscene.

© Nadine Fraczkowski

The whole idea is to satisfy our dreams from which milieus are created. Artists give form to dreams. Artists give intention, which in itself creates the instruments and the means of expression. That is the obscenity. Not the result of a cynical and cruel deliberated judgement, or the explicit proposal of an end. Alternatively, it opens to the fields of possibilities while undoing the accumulation of models of analysis, perspectives and positions that are already in place, and have been ruling, governing the pragmatic links serving and embracing different socio-cultural environments.

If we recognise ourselves as what we are, who are those people to whom Fraczkowski introduce us? Fundamentally, they are some of her friends. They have become part of a subculture structure used to model motifs recurring at a smaller scale. They, like her, live and are part of a subculture that paradoxically is everywhere and nowhere. Then, with time, they would become a norm to the point of becoming a national style, an established norm to the detriment of its originality. Even when it is imposed, imported, born under those that we battle against. Which, progressively, starts to exhibit a natural repeating self-similar pattern. And, who are they? These portraits of people standing by themselves in an underground environment, gazing directly in to the camera, into us, describe a random and chaotic phenomena that is growing, that is fluid, and in formation. Joggled between the real and the representation. Those people are symbolic figures representing identity-based communities: lesbian next to gays posing next to transgender next to heterosexual, actors and thieves. But why does that bother us? Why that shock society as a whole? Why is she/he like that?

We recognise, therefore, that a zone of generalised possibilities exist and of collaborative achievements is already formed. Significations are already traced between ourselves (as producers) and the object matter and ourselves (as audience), which confers upon us the quality of being what we are. That is the unfortunate or fortunate fate. The present mediates between what we are and the perception of what we can be, between individuality and the generalisation of being a single thing. If nothingness is perceived as appearing from subjectivity, then that subjectivity, which at the beginning was at the margins, has become the norm to the detriment of its original intention.

Bibliography:
Baudrillard, Jean (2003) Passwords. London: Verso
Phillips, Adam (2010) On balance. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Rogoff, Irit (2006) ‘Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist?’, in Kein.org. Accessed February 26th, 2013.

Published at VASA Project: Where Do We Go Now! Nadine Fraczkowski