The cabinet looks empty — I take a step towards it, my breath fogging the glass. Keeping my gaze fixed, something amidst the vegetation faintly moves. Crawling, the stick insects manifest their presence like an apparition, they manifest themselves as some pictures do, emerging from certain dark recesses where they receded to nest.
The animal that I am longs for proximity, snouts touching, but something — the camera? — keeps getting in the way.
I try and try but my earth-sharing companions remain beyond my reach, they linger like ghosts on my film roll, trembling ever so slightly in the red light of the darkroom. I bring my snout close to the photographic paper and sniffle to pick up a scent to guide me back, but I am pricked by a sense of anticipated grief — are we able to preserve life only in its most mortifying form, petrified in museum cabinets and in photographs alike? And yet I return and show up for this encounter over and over again, love and longing making a fool of me, as I stay awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog.

All things laid dormant 
Skinnerboox (2024)

Winner of FE+SK Book Award 24
24x32cm
80 pages
Swiss Binding with open spine
ISBN 978-88-94895-73-5
–
Designed by Milo Montelli and Bendetta Casagrande
Text by lee rae walsh

Shortlisted, Arles Author Book Award 2024 
Shortlisted, Singapore International Photography Festival 2024 

Reviews
Collector Daily, Andrew Blake

Developed in Athens during the workshop Group K, held by Nearest Truth with Raymond Meeks, Federico Clavarino, Brad Feuerhelm with the collaboration of Simon Bray and Myrto Steirou, during which 22 photographers produced new work and worked collaboratively towards a collective folio book, published by Nearest Truth Editions in spring 2024. 

Based on a Japanese folio of the same name and design, Group K takes its form from a listless series of images that the Group K participants brought back from their six days of shooting in Athens. The project took form over the week and has now been published in a 128 page folio edition featuring the work of all 22 participants and instructors. The work is a facsimile of the original 1970s Japanese folio of the same name.

Athens, 20th May

To have all this nature in the city means to repopulate it with death, to return it to an integral part of daily experience. 
Oranges rot on the sidewalks, cats slowly stroll in the morning sun looking to procure food. 
There is an extraordinary abundance in this city, that type of horridly fertile life that can exist only hand in hand with its sister death. 
It is an abundance that is nearly obscene — I like it.
Viscerally alive.

Athens’ first cemetery, two kids playing besides an open hole in the ground awating for a body to be lowered inside it. 
An old lady walks around blowing a whistle.

I do not know how to leave.

When I will find my way, the smell of death will follow me into the city.

I am getting hungry (”little hunger gurgle”).

The city carries the sickly sweetish smell of vegetation rotting under the sun. Summer is the season of decay.

Sweaty sweetish stink of my flesh attracts mosquitoes. 
I am all an itch and in need of a shower.

Athens, 21st May

Eyes like those of a newborn. Gooey and not quite open, not quite in focus yet (again Grifi - the eye is but the biological evolution of a teardrop...)

They will guide me through a damp city. May my pictures be the eyelashes that tickle its surface —
a caress, something soft. 

Today the city shies away from me. 

A morning of failures (I cherish you, failed contacts). 
I am off to the Natural History Nuseun in the hope to be rejoint by myself and my longings.

Thinking ahead —
gentle rubbings, surface frictions,
a contact (of an absence / an absence of contact?)
(”The song the sore of the cull”)
An ongoing negotiation of things kept and things forgotten
The shape changes over and over and over again
Malleability of a supple core

Maybe last night’s rain washed away the smell that guided me.

Athens, 22nd May

Last time I was at the cemetery I spent a long time looking at the cemetery attendants performing death work — chants and funerals and wakes but also (more importantly?) digging, cementing, cleaning, building, moving... 

Tomb rubbing — tomb robbing
Felt like a thief
to rub a tomb — to rob a tomb

-> Here res/t
    only have 
    high to / 

-> My angel
    My God
    eternal lightness

-> Here rests

-> Sleep love
    Peaceful
    Bitter the / 

-> Your soul
     the God
     The
     Only 
     High 
     One 

-> Sleep
    Bitter

-> Sleep my angel
    Here rests the body 

-> Your body                            my tear
     found a place                     dirt

Group K
Nearest Truth Editions (2024)


Group K was/is : Andrea Alessandrini, Lise Baltzer, Fabio Barbato, Simon Bray, Lucile Brizard, Derek Brown, Benedetta Casagrande, Federico Clavarino, Emmanuel Coupe-Kalomiris, Brad Feuerhelm, Jack Garland, Oliver Gerhardt, Steven Hurwitz, Raymond Meeks, Alessandro Mina, David Myers, Joshua Olley, Mihail Onea, Eugenia Patsouri, Jordan Reyes, Rita Silva, Ewa Monika Zebrowski

Art Direction: Brad Feuerhelm
Edit and Sequencing: Myrto Steirou
Design: Simon Bray
Portraits: Raymond Meeks
Printed by: Fotolio, Athens
Typeface: Avenier Book
Published: July 2024

Portfolio Edition of 60 copies
122 Pages

Maria di Magdala investigates the myth of Saint Mary Magdalene. Reflecting on the complex relationship between memory and faith, authenticity and fiction, the project questions by what means imaginary narratives shape and transform substantial reality to the point of making them indistinguishable. Informed through numerous appealing, emotionally riveting and dramatic representations of her figure in fine arts, her myth richly animates our imagination: contemplative, lustful, enlightened, she survives in our memory as the penitent prostitute who renounced her passions to follow Jesus, becoming one of the main vehicles for the dissemination of Catholic orthodoxy and shaping Western understandings of womanhood. Yet once the myth has been created, we forget to be its creators. Cultural memory goes unquestioned to such an extent we fail to recognise our being its own makers. Retracing the Saint’s passage into Southern France as narrated in the medieval “Golden Legend” - which tells the story of Mary Magdalene’s journey by boat from Jerusalem to the Camargue - the project examines how the myth was constructed and instrumentalized to establish the local landscape as a post-biblical Holy Land, transferring from Palestine to Europe not only the cult and the vestiges of the material presence of the Saint, but the pilgrimage experience itself. The project examines the creation of culture in order to question its very origins and revive the lively multiplicity of Mary Magdalen's historical identities. Working with similar strategies as the myth, the project works along the fine interstice between memory, reality and imagination; real landscapes where the myth is set and classical representations of Mary Magdalene (both in literature and fine arts) merge with dreamlike, uncanny visions of the female body.

Phasmids was developed in 2018 during the artist residency Cuore di Pietra, during which 11 photographers and 11 writers were commissioned to investigate the area of Mount Conero: a block of stone that, millions of years ago, detached itself from the Apennines to stop in the east, on the shore of the Adriatic Sea.

"Phasmids - from the greek phasma, which means shape, apparition, vision, ghost and, consequentially, presage - embody an emblematic experience of a bigger issue regarding the figure and the defiguration, the similar and the dissimilar, the form and the unshaped. It is as if phasmids, these animals without heads or tails, could lend their name to an undefined class of small apparent things, in evident contact with the authority of the ghost." -
Accidental Knowledge, George Didi-Huberman

I. Cave

The Mortarolo cave is believed to be a site of transfigurations. At nightime, the rocks on its floor  rearrange themselves to form the figure of a body cradled to sleep on the cold stone of its womb.
Who will watch over their lonely slumber?
At the break of dawn sunlight creeps onto the cave’s exterior walls, creeps into its cracks, a massive pinhole of projected, unfixed shadows.

II. Camera

Light infiltrates the camera body as the shutter opens and closes, the world pouring in, similar and dissimilar to itself, transfigured. The photographic image is never evident but apparent: it appears pulled out from the pitch darkness of the camera’s belly where it lied latent, awaiting to be materialized. 

III. Dark Room

An apparition brought forth by a process of obscuration, as light burns black blotches onto the film emulsion; black blotches that become impermeable to the same light that formed them, that shape the positive photographic print projected by the enlarger.  Small apparent things, in evident contact with the authority of the ghost. 

Pop-up exhibition Step, Kneel, Rub, Touch, Look, Grasp, Repeat, Page Blanche Gallery, Paris, 2018