THE PERSISTENCE OF OBJECTS was the beginning of my photographic exploration, using a flatbed scanner to capture digital images. The process involves scanning body parts alongside objects belonging to both me and my family, as well as found objects.
Inspired heavily by Rilke's "Duino Elegies," this series stems from a desire to document and preserve traces of life's passage. The project attempts to engage in what Rilke refers to as Sagen — to "say", to hold on, to narrate, and to testify to our existence and the objects that intersect with it. I sought to capture the tension between transient, mobile bodies and enduring, static objects, a contrast enabled by the scanning device. Unlike a camera, the scanner reveals the temporal distortion inherent in photography, where different parts of an image belong to different moments. By using the scanner, the illusion of photographic immediacy is exposed, presenting a composition of various temporal fragments assembled into a single frame.
In this interplay between the sequential capture of time and space, the evanescent, moving bodies contrast sharply with the fixed, persistent objects, which attempt to deceive the device in a manner akin to traditional photography. Nevertheless, there are no immutable objects, nor immutable bodies; instead, there is a layering of traces of existence that coexist in different moments within the same image, leaving marks, imprints, dust, and more on the objects and on the scanner's surface.
