A manifesto for performing arts photography

A manifesto for performing arts photography

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Project Plans – A Manifesto

  1. 1. There’s always a moment in your life when you are led to compare photography to something else. My suggestion: compare it to translation. Photography can be inaccurate, temporary, wrong, and brilliant—just like translation can be.
  2. 2. A picture is a sentence in a foreign language.
  3. 3. We should always speak in a foreign language.
  4. 4. I find it impossible to escape a fragmentary approach to my work. I enter my archive with the same intentions I have when visiting ruins, remnants, and vestiges. I see it through an archaeological lens: something was there, something might still be. But unlike archaeology, I rebuild from the fragments without any intention of restoring an ideal origin. The idea of the project is enough for me.
  5. 5. The first time I thought about Project Plans was with Project Plans Stones Wood Plastic. I was inside an abandoned apartment, left unfinished during renovation. In all the fragments, the cracks, the drawn plans on the walls, the debris and discarded materials, I felt the tension between what had been and all possible material futures—absolutely decisive.
  6. 6. The only thing worth representing.
  7. 7. (Everything usually represented in photography exists thanks to a commonly accepted ambiguity—one that also generates market value.)
  8. 8. Among all photographic genres, stage photography is the one that brings me closest to the tension of plans and projects. I’m not sure I know what the performers and artists and directors and choreographers want—where they come from, or where they would like to go. I don’t think it’s my role to represent that.
  9. 9. I believe I must accept the fact that they hand me a key to access my archive. That they can contribute to modifying it, expanding it, charging it with unexpected intentions.
  10. 10. The second time I thought about Project Plans was with Project Plans Women Bodies, in collaboration with Kulturscio’k. We told women they were being photographed to represent their own idea of femininity.
  11. 11. The usual obsession with form—nothing more.
  12. 12. And the effort of construction. To assemble, to give shape, to orient bodies, to fold materials—whatever they may be.
  13. 13. Everything can be arranged. Everything can disappear.

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