Amnesia

失憶

Beijing
2020

Beijing

2020
A dark red armchair stands in a tiled room, beside an empty stretch of floor.
01

The city continually renews itself, and continually produces a past of its own. Some spaces are removed from the narrative of the present before they have disappeared. They coexist with prosperity, yet seem to belong to an age no longer acknowledged. Decay continues, while time appears to stand still. Here, change and progress cease to mean the same thing.1

Amnesia was photographed in abandoned spaces in Beijing. I encounter times I have never lived through. They take material form before me, distinct yet remote. To enter these spaces is not to gain access to their past. The more closely I look, the more I feel the unbridgeable distance between what remains and the lives once lived there.

A red thermos flask, bent sharply at its middle, stands upright among fragments on the floor.
02
An apothecary cabinet with handwritten labels is seen through an open doorway.
03

Photography asks of disappearance an image upon which the gaze can still rest. It brings overlooked existences back into view, granting them “an immortality at odds with time”. Yet this immortality has exacting conditions: the instant preserved can no longer unfold. Reality continues to change; the past within the image is permitted to return without end.

An open wooden drawer contains small boxes, glass pieces and laboratory instruments.
04
Dust-covered books overlap diagonally in a dark interior.
05

The photographer participates in this redistribution of fates. Framing, lingering, isolating a moment: these determine what may remain, and in what form. Even when the body is concealed behind the camera, the position from which it looks remains embedded in the image. Preservation also entails a severance from reality.2

Two blue payment terminals rest on scattered papers and debris.
06
Red marks and hanging scraps of newspaper interrupt a tiled wall above a pile of debris.
07
A window divided by dark frames reveals branches and a brick building beyond.
08
A detached red door and a small empty cabinet stand against a broad brick wall with faded lettering.
09

Forgetting, too, can inhabit a surviving image. A surface may endure while the relations that once made it part of a life are lost.3 Amnesia remains in the interval between the two, keeping visible both what time has left behind and its remoteness. Photography preserves these presences, while fixing our distance from them.

References

  1. Svetlana Boym, “Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia”, Cabinet 28 (2007–08).
  2. Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977).
  3. David Campany, “Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on Problems of ‘Late Photography’” (2003).