A B O U T P L A C E

“About Place”, Cella+Knoll, c-prints, 8x10 & 4x5 negatives, 60x48”, 12 images, ongoing.

REFLECTING the impact of globalization and cultural fusion on personal circumstance, “About Place” deals with displacement, liminality and cultural identity in the lives of collaborating artists Klaus Knoll and Cella, neither refugees nor migrants or expatriats, rootless all the same. Like many of their projects, “About Place” shares an attention to the built environment, specifically to temporary architecture and ideas about the use of space.

Cella: These images diary a preoccupation with home. Creating a camera obscura out of places I have lived temporarily or imagined living is in a/my sense the embodiment of a place, a room, my of outer skin. The act of creating a camera obscura is a way of bringing that which is outside inside (a kind of internalizing which is not dissimilar to a plant digging its roots). The “live” rooms nurture a desire to belong where I am, and the photographs document these acts.

Klaus: We don’t have the same word: Cella’s “home” is not congruent with my “Heimat”. She is envious for something I lost long ago. We each form our own idea of the term, talking of roots and other subterranean intentions. Some experiences are still comparable, be yond all boundaries of culture and language: exile, being without a home, her early hunger for and my old hatred of normality. Home/Heimat is the focal point of this work, in fantasy as well as the one felt painfully missing. The play with projections speaks of deception, vision and the flowing boundaries between them. The melding of interior and outer world, the mutual permeation of normally separated spaces is not without a certain erotic component.

Cella: We did one session where I lay on the sofa nude without moving until Klaus returned, a very long time later. The city tattooed my flesh. Due to the extreme heat in the blackened, airless August apartment, sweat drizzled down my skin like rain on glass. I had the sensation of my skin being sipped up by the large camera inches away from me. It was strangely erotic. In retrospect I think both the performative element to the live camera obscura session as well as having a body in the still image, was the most successful for me, getting me closest to my desire to embed myself somewhere.

PROCESS

In apartments, houses, hotel rooms and other places we have inhabited we blacken the rooms with tarp and tape, then allow sketchy ambient light to seep through, illuminating the interior without losing the upside down exterior projection created by a single small hole, transforming the room into a giant camera obscura. We then photograph the rooms with a 4x5 or 8x10 camera for up to a day. Images 1-3: View looking out at Manhattan > windows blackened with tarp > outside view projected inside apartment on all surfaces (upside down) in darkened apartment via hole in tarp. Image 4: A camera obscura from the 19th century: Hokusai, 100 Views of Mt. Fuji, Vol III/99