RE-THINKING VISUAL
Studio " Re-Thinking Visual" is a collaboration
between Laetitia Boulud & Alex de Jong
Visual artists Laetitia Boulud (Israel) and Alexander de Jong (Netherlands)
founded Rethinking Visual as a lab in 2009.
Central to our research is how, as humans, we bend and mold our “natural”
mode of perception. our experiments trace, map and scan the patterns of nature, and of the human-animal, using the syntax of ritual expression.
This happens with “photographic” means: we sharpen and direct the gaze,
we notice, collect and select from Nature.
We track what has been left behind and we translate these human remains
into artifacts: these may be prints, objects, or soundscapes, time-based tracing of symbolic or literal gestures. Our installations are always site-specific.
Those who are and that which is present, we invite to the process of making,
to experience our constructed semblance of the natural world.
Both coming from Buddhist practice, we highlight the transience of man’s existence on this earth.
Photo by Elsa Kramer
"Longing for Sight" is an installation containing a long dark space you walkthrough led by the sound and guiding lines into a dome where you are surrounded by video projection
וריאציות על עשרת הדיברות | הנפש היא זו שרואה עיתון הארץ. מאת שני ליטמן
Exhibition text/ Avi Pitchon
In a tradition of postmodern critique and in inspiration from Jacques Lacan, we ask what is it that the seen is hiding,
and what blind spots are created, intentionally or otherwise, by the conventions of the visual? Are visual blind spots
related to emotional ones? What is it that we distract ourselves from seeing?
This encounter captures an intuition. The spoken word, present as an audio “trail” translates and mediates that fleeting yet ever-present depth, a void of realization that is visible in the visual as trails, hints – signs left behind of that which is desirable, following Lacanʼs ʻObject Petit aʼ.
Precluding sight invites the observer to transcend mere spectatorship; leave a mark, engage and entangle.
Our invitation of the viewer to lose sight, therefore, also expresses the desire to push photography beyond eye-seeing. The photographic work is presented as a continuous stream of images, a mix & match playground based on the infinite possibilities of interlacing one thought to another.
This process contains no exclamation points. Each slowly unfolding photographic stream moves according
to its own inner rhythm. The tempo is subjective, not declarative. This work process and its particular look and feel reflect the desire to limit, blur and otherwise interfere with normal eyesight in order to attain that elusive,
subtly subjective (and thus intuitively honest, truthful, close to home) quality of movement, tone, and volume – a culmination of softness; the softness that unveils behind from, or is trapped by a misleading sharpness.
This process led us to abandoning the visual towards the touch and towards the sound. Seeing becomes sensing.
The blinding white origin filled with a whiteness vibe is expressed in the “light hole” at the heart of the exhibition.
The structure of a white dome (alluding to snow blindness, but also to the barren lunar landscape and to the shape
of the eyeball) reveals a confined, secret space, flooded with light. Within it, images corresponding to this overwhelming whiteness are screened on the domeʼs inside. Here, the journey to the source is completed.
"Heart/Cube" is a sound photograph.
I had a dream where Alex & I met in Tel Aviv. we run together through crowds, in order to get somewhere and hug.
then, at the moment of the hug, Alex shrinks and reappears in the form of a cartoon inside my palm. there is a tube coming out of his ear and he breathes through it.
I know that the way to keep him alive is to press on that tube so his air does not go out - but I don’t.
I realize that he is really dead just when I see that his wife has changed his Skype icon from green to red.
After waking up from the dream, I shot two photographs, then I told the dream to Alex and decided to send
him objects, for him to interpret the dream in an artistic form.
the end result is this video piece that he shot and edited.
The two photographs made inspired by the dream
"Regarding The Kids " is a Phototalk Dialogue
Laetitia: it's a window. Inside the glass, there is a drawing of a silhouette of a woman holding a child’s hand and
two other kids in a silhouette as well.
It's a sticker I think .and I got close to that window in London in 2007 and shot it.
in fact, what you see is my reflection in that woman’s dress and the part of me which is reflected in my two hands holding the camera, the camera a bit of my head. it's in black and white. grainy
Alex: what was in London that you were there? you found this to shoot. what were you looking for?
Laetitia: I wander around not looking for anything really. but what made me stop was this iconic woman
with her 3 kids stuck in that window. and a certain casual loneliness too, I thought to myself in a kind of a loop,
gazing into the banality. this obviousness of parenting
Alex: And you regarded the kids. and put yourself into the picture
Laetitia: yes and I was thinking ….regarding the kids… not regard. it was a gaze that led to inhabit that stomach of hers
Alex: putting yourself in her dress
Laetitia: being in it on the one hand, as her 4th child. and also wondered what it would be like to carry one of those
actually I was looking through the womb
Alex: and it’s a self-portrait
Laetitia: yes
Alex: who’s in the self-portrait?
Laetitia: me and my family. the unborn one. the one from back then. me and my empty womb. something like that.
“The hours are breathing, faint and low” is a location-based installation that encompasses the houses around Hollum’s church tower, the church tower itself, and the Dit Eiland gallery.
the art piece echoes themes from Borges’ story “The Aleph” and poems by Edgar Allan Poe.
The inhabitants who live around Hollum’s church tower share their stories of birth and death, belonging and journeying, intimacy, and openness. Through the unique, personal telling of their own confrontation with such moments, their stories become part of a larger, universally shared history of instances when the veil between our world and a hidden “other” world is at its most translucent.
The artists carefully revisit and unfold these stories and work with their essence to return them as individual
gifts to the persons that told them. Using literary references, fairy tales, and ancient,
universal symbols, this process of telling and re-telling refers back to beliefs in a hidden, unseen place.
The installation’s location becomes a place both otherworldly and real a map of actual and re-imagined lives.
The exchange of gifts happens through individual art pieces, specifically made for the storytellers who display them in or near their houses during Art Month, In this sense, the full work also refers to the Dutch habit of allowing passers-by a furtive peek into the house, by keeping the curtains open.
Thus the intimacy of personal life may be briefly witnessed by outsiders.
Venue: "Dir Eiland" gallery, Ameland. (2011)
Curator: Timo Mank
"Be quiet eyes" is a site-specific installation where it invites spectators into the field to individually listen to a sound texture
"A_live" is an installation show, containing two self portraits, two videos, and a sound texture
Venu: Maze 9, "White Night'. Tel Aviv.
Curator: Ruth Patir
