Reeling Presence

photo-sound installation, 10 min (2020)

The joint artwork by Francis Ruyter and Walter Seidl with sound by Stefan Geissler resonates current forms of crisis via excavating archives, thereby conjuring up fleeting moments of perception in their historical significance. Ruyter reiterates captions used for his abstracted drawings and paintings, which are based on images culled from the photographic archive of the Farm Security Administration. Seidl digitized analog b/w slide photographs of places from his own archive starting in the 1990s that hint at notions of absence,   

emptiness and void. The ghostly nature of the project questions the cultural heritage of the USA with takes on the recent past. Geissler’s sound takes up influences of the 1930s by referencing the field recordings of American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Hence, the ubiquity of formulating and referring to fluctuating moments of catastrophe is tackled in order to question possible forms of the present and their relevance for the future.