Sunday, May 17, 2009

Isabelle Hayeur: Photography and the capitalist wasteland

DRIFTING from Isabelle Hayeur on Vimeo.


With the abundance of media focus on beautiful décor, home renovations and shows like Trading Places seemingly multiplying daily, the work of Isabelle Hayeur gets us out of the house to take a look at the environment we’re all complicit in creating.


In creating the new suburban developments we are moving away from the “distinctive and local to the uniform and global.” We flatten and erase the former landscape and history of an area, then fill in the space with “McHomes”.

Hayeur’s figureless images juxtapose the natural with the manmade with surprising results: The more we humans manipulate the earth, the more dehumanized it appears.

- Christine Redfern (Montreal Mirror)

http://isabelle-hayeur.com


see also:

Formes de monuments
(2008- 2009)

Photo series realized during an artist residency at
L'Espace photographique Contretype (Brussels)
in collaboration with VOX contemporary image (Montreal)


Christian Roy writes:

What does it hide, this parallel suggested in the series "Formes de monuments" between the development of photography and the development of a world economy —of the world as economy? On the one hand, something of the nature of development shows through the cracks in the walls of abandoned houses, pockmarked by deliberate neglect as symptoms of “brusselisation”. For the capital of Belgium and Europe has been the textbook breeding ground of that urban cancer fostered by the cynical speculation of real estate developers and their friends in public office on the decay of entire neighbourhoods beyond repair. This is a devious scorched earth policy that paves the way for ruthless colonization by rootless cookie-cutter projects to take over in the wake of the eventual demolition of targeted areas. On the other hand, the surface of the walls displayed here, once turned metallic by digital processing, becomes reminiscent of copper plates, altered by the elements as the surface of a daguerreotype used to be by chemical fumes to receive and then reveal an image. This early photographic process was the first to be commercialized, in lock step with the triumph of the bourgeoisie and of the ideology of Progress in the revolutions of 1830 in France and Belgium. Likewise here, chemical agents seem to alter a light-sensitive surface to reveal the latent image it hides as none other than that of the symbolic agents of economic development in Belgium, namely the entrepreneur-princes commemorated on so many monuments in Brussels. It was Leopold II who personally financed the construction of the Arcades du Cinquantenaire, celebrating the country’s jubilee, from which are taken the effigies of its dynasty, marking its progress through history. A true heir of Louis-Philippe, “Bourgeois King” of the French, the second King of the Belgians used for this the profits of the Congo Free State, the private colony he had invested in, beyond the purview of the political institutions it was his function to safeguard as constitutional monarch. Enslaved to savage colonial exploitation with the civilized Western alibi of freeing it from the Arab slave-trade, a grateful Congo (Le Congo reconnaissant in a plaque under the Arcades) thus even got to pay for this monument to its own economic exploitation at a scandalous human cost, even for the times. But development, like the ouroboros serpent, has always fed off its own backside in a vicious circle; this is the never-ending story these walls are telling us, like an ancient Egyptian relief scarred by time and its ironies as it shows immortalized monarchs in hieratic profile, with the cryptic comment of glyphs added by nomadic urban tribes in the capital of the European Union (whose flag, by unwitting coincidence, multiplies twelve-fold the lone golden star on a blue field of the Congo Free State). Is this a reminder that the gleaming monuments of global capitalism are doomed by the instant obsolescence they are built upon, bound to be overtaken by it as the pyramids and temples of a civilization premised on eternal stability eventually were by the dust of time’s relentless desert?

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