immaginative cenzorship — Michele Bressan

The project came out of a research which ended becoming my PhD thesis. In the past few years i ve became more and more interested in how archival materials are integrated in other structures, especially art works. Since the very beginning, i was interested in how the subjects identity is processed through the different contexts and layers. i ended up noticing that almost always the privacy aspect is totally skipped, somehow inoculated into the idea that ”most probably the portraied persons are already dead”. My approach always overlooked on this matter, keeping a sort of awareness in that direction, one pushing me to find conceptual outcomes capable of both rising questions and offer solutions.

This series has its roots both into the political censorship mechanism, where characters who have become undesirable were erased from the official photographs (we can remember the Vanishing Commissar 1942, Joseph Goebbles erased form Hitler”s 1937 pics or the more recent practice of North Korean lider Kim Jong Un or removing characters from pictures or video footage) and Romanian military history. My comment is built by using original WW2 period military photographs depicting Romanian troops. Beside the propaganda ones, there is a lack of images depicting Romanian soldiers on the frontline, both because it was forbidden to have or use a photocamera in a military operation context, but also because most of the Romanian soldiers did not have a photographic education or the financial resources in order to fund such a hobby/process. If Thomash Hriscorn in his series Pixel mania used to pixelate parts of the images, I went somehow further, by chosing to totally erase the subjects, the punctum, the reason why those photographs were taken. The missing parts are described and presented together with every image, as some sort of footnote. This way , the viewer is forced/invited to imagine the scene, also by establishing a trust relation, by believing that the text is describing exactly what is missing. This method both invites the viewer to elaborate a personal scenario and preserve the anonymity of the subjects. it a sort of play in which each image is equalized by being transformed into a landscape that functions as a blank canvas for our interpretation.

Romanian soldiers chopping meat from a dead horse

Dead Romanian soldiers near a railway