Clepsydrae 2022

Clepsydrae 2022 is a photographic record of works produced that year, whose originals no longer exist. Those pieces — fragile and completely exposed — sought to transform themselves permanently, to become, fully, clepsydrae. The original glass plates were produced and exhibited at the Finnish Museum of Photography, an institution recognised for its optimal conditions for the preservation of analogue photography. The tension between the work and the museum's conservation team sought to expose the inevitable vulnerability of photographic materials, as well as to reveal the permanence of images as a constant human effort, rather than an inherent quality of photography itself. The records of those original pieces — taken mostly before the exhibition at the museum — are printed as facsimiles using precisely the materials that represent the contemporary standard of photographic conservation: pigment inks, acid-free paper, and UV glass. It is in this contrast that the will toward permanence reveals itself as an explicitly human and contradictory behaviour: a symbolic gesture, as affective as it is possessive, that speaks to how we inhabit the world.