Katrin Korfman’s research project centres on the photographic image as waste.
Through ‘Wastescapes’, she asks how visual, conceptual and technical aspects of her work as a photographer can be used to critically reflect on the Wasteocene. Her research takes her into the field, to visit numerous waste processing plants, but also deeper into her own practice and her studio, where she experiments with artistic methods to generate other forms of the photographic image, through the juxtaposition and entanglement of waste processing procedures and variants of image production, editing and manifestation.
Keywords: WASTE, PHOTOGRAPHIC PRODUCTION, WASTE REPROCESSING SYSTEMS, POST PRODUCTION, COMPOSITIONISM, MAKING THROUGH ASSEMBLAGE, PROCESS, TERRITORY, MAPS
As a photographer, I am interested in what ways artistic research methods can be used to generate extended, processed, dismantled, altered, or assembled forms of the photographic image, through the juxtaposition of waste reprocessing systems, circular systems, and image production. I photographically depict collected waste that was generated in my direct surroundings and will be processed, recycled, or re-used. Then using methods distilled from such concepts as assemblage and Compositionism, I start to construct and deconstruct my photographs. To be more precise, I investigate the relationship between the systems of waste sorting and those of photographic production, editing, sorting, and re-composition. Here, I am not looking for new art forms, but for alternative ones.
Relation to ‘Mapping the Cartographic’:
I apply elements to my artwork that assign structure, grid, navigation, and measuring speculating on our attempt to ‘get a grip’ on the anthropocentric mess we made out of our world (Demos 2017, 28). Can coordinate guide us out of the apocalypse we are facing? Accordingly, I introduce the aerial view and visual suggestions that refer to landscape, mapping, surveying, borders, and cartography. Here I want to evoke and recall connections with sociopolitical and economical structures that are clearly linked to the dilemmas of the ‘Climate Regime’. When leaving the rigid rectangular structure of the photographic image and transforming the ground of my artwork into an unframed form, I head to fictive and imaginary landscapes and borders. By looking at the work, the viewer can zoom in and out, gazing at the local and the global, the close-up and the overview. Within the image, no horizon nor perspective is presented. That way the border of my photograph is becoming unfixed. These images are leaving the frame, depicting alien territory and undiscovered terrain.
(Extract from ‘Wastescapes’ Katrin korfmann, 2020, see full text in link below
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