 Bonjour à tous, quelques mots d'introduction en français avant la conférence qui se tiendra en anglais. Donc, nous sommes très heureux d'accueillir Brian Ifaire pour cette conférence organisée dans le cadre de l'exposition de Zoé Léonard à l'Rio to the River. Brian Ifaire est historienne de l'art, professeur à l'Université College à Londres. Ces recherches s'intéressent et se nourrissent d'aller-retour entre les avant-garde, je crois que c'était le sujet de sa thèse de doctorat, et puis la pratique d'artistes contemporains. Elle a écrit de nombreux livres et des essais importants sur des artistes tels que Eva Essay, Louise Bourgeois, Ronnie Horne, Gabriel Orozco, parmi tant d'autres, ainsi qu'un livre sur l'art des années 50 et 60, intitulé The Infinite Line, Remaking Art After Modernism, publié en 2004. Brian Ifaire a également été commissaire d'exposition, notamment de la très belle rétrospective Dany Albers, présentée à la Tête moderne à Londres et au cavin à Düsseldorf en 2018, avec Anna Coxson et Maria Miller Charec qui est ici présente. Elle va aujourd'hui nous parler de Zoé Léonard, de cette oeuvre magistrale qui est à l'Rio to the River, en articulant sa pensée autour de l'idée de la notion de projet. Voilà. Merci. Merci Christophe. Bonsoir à tous. C'est extraordinaire d'être ici et de voir cette exposition que j'ai pensée beaucoup sur les années, et d'avoir parlé de ça souvent avec Zoé Léonard, mais bien sûr, je n'ai jamais vu ça. Donc, d'être ici, d'avoir l'occasion de voir cette exposition, mais aussi d'être ici à Moudam, je veux vraiment juste remercier Christophe pour l'invitation, et aussi Sarah Beaumont pour m'aider beaucoup, Bettina Steinbrugger et Suzanne Cotter aussi, qui m'a demandé la première place. Donc, je suis vraiment heureuse d'être ici. Merci. Donc, ce projet, je vais parler très bien de ce projet, que vous aurez vu à l'extérieur. C'est un projet que Zoé Léonard a pris 5 ans à faire, un seul travail, 5 ans à faire. Dans l'entire, il consiste de 550 photographes, je pense, édité de plein de milliers d'euros, donc le labeur de faire ça, c'est juste immense. Et ici, à Moudam, c'est la première installation édite, je pense, à 250 images. Et les photographes, comme vous l'avez vu, courent autour des roues, comme un rivier, avec beaucoup de crues et des intervalles élevées entre les images, ce qui, je pense, est important. Donc, il y a des flows, il y a des pauses et des startes, il y a plusieurs petites séries dans la série plus grande. J'ai remarqué que dans la conversation avec Zoé Léonard, entre Zoé Léonard et Suzanne Cotter, je pense, sur cette très stage, j'espère que j'aurais été là. Zoé a parlé, elle a dit les mots, elle voulait que les photographes soient passés par l'architecture des roues. Et c'est exactement ce qui se passe. C'est comme la grande course du Rio Grande, le rivier et le travail suivent entre le Mexique et l'Université de l'Université et le Gulf du Mexique, où il entre dans la mer. Bien sûr, le Rio Grande est un rivier avec des politiques qui sont émettées dans ça, et plus ou moins explosivement, que quand Zoé Léonard avait fait ce travail pendant les années de Trump. Et ces politiques sont certainement inscrits dans le travail, pas simplement comme un sujet. Mais dans des manières complexes, je pense, et des manières que j'aimerais explorer cette nuit. Je veux commencer avec la structure basale du travail. Pour la première partie du travail, Zoé Léonard s'appelle le prologue. Il a été vu avant, quand il a été exhibité à la Carnegie International en 2018. Mais maintenant, il s'est montré, évidemment, très différemment, qu'il peut vraiment acte comme un prologue, comme un prologue littéraire. Et c'est comme si c'était préparé pour le reste. Et c'est une suite de photographes qui sont aussi assez distinctes, comme vous l'avez remarqué, du reste. Ce sont les passages de l'eau, l'eau qui s'éteint, l'eau qui s'éteint, l'eau qui s'éteint. L'eau que c'est dans les photographs almost appears to congeal, or petrifi on the surface. there's almost an opaque thickness to the water. And for the viewer, as we begin with the prologue, and as we begin to look, we kind of hover just above the water. sur l'intensif du sens de l'opacité du water mais aussi le momentum du water. Comme dans un prologue, c'est un genre de préquel et différencié du corps principal du travail. Et comme on l'adresse, c'est clair qu'ils sont en couleur, un peu en couleur, ils sont très bleus, mais ils sont dans la couleur que le verre est en gré. Le prologue met un dialogue entre l'immensité de cette rivière et les petites sections de la rivière. C'est un dynamique entre le flux continu et les photographes qui arrêtent et arrêtent. Il s'agit d'une surface de matériel étrange qui est comme une landscape de miniature. Il s'agit d'une dynamique de proximité, de closité et de distance qui va structurier le tout. Mais c'est aussi une partie essentielle de cette forme tripartite, essentielle pour l'idée du projet que c'est, ce que je comprends, je pense, c'est un travail dans le making, qui concerne les processus artistiques du making sur l'un de l'autre, mais aussi le temps et d'autres demandes qu'il fait sur nous, comme les spectateurs, comme nous l'avons vu. Donc, chaque section, après tout, est une sorte de condensation d'un moment, mais aussi un passage d'un moment qui s'entend dans le verre. Donc, dans le corps principal du travail, nous suivons le cours de la rivière, sur la route épique, comme il se passe au Gulf de Mexico. D'ailleurs, notez le changement dramatique du format horizontal et du horizon qui donne un long, latéral, un flow discontinuant au cours du travail, toujours bloqué mais toujours en train de bouger, jusqu'à ce que ce soit pas, et qu'il se trouve. Donc, cet impératif formal et le format, c'est très self-reflexif et self-mimique, je pense. Je me sens que ça résonne avec Roland Barth's description de ce qu'il pense que le projet est. Dans l'une de ses séries finales, qui s'appelle « La préparation du novel », il parle de ce qu'il pense que le projet est. Et le travail que le projet va ultimement devenir, comme il s'appelle, un maquette de sa propre préparation, qui, dans le processus, expose les techniques de l'apparatus qui ont fait ça. Il y a beaucoup de ça, je pense, dans Zoe Leonard's projet. Et puis, la dernière partie, la petite partie, le codeur, à l'end... Sorry, c'est... Le Gulf de Mexico. Donc, la dernière partie, le codeur, elle change son apparatus, son type de caméra, ces principes digitaux, en fait, ils sont en couleur, d'ailleurs, qui sont mis sur l'iphone d'un scénarien, son scénarien. Et ils sont très clairement différenciés. Vous pouvez voir la marginale de la scénarienne sur la gauche. Vous savez, c'est une image qui est manifestement mediée par la scénarienne digitale. Donc, c'est une façon de disparaître la fantasie d'un point climatique au point de vue du projet, je pense, que peut-être que les wafers se crassent sur la plage de la Gulf de Mexico. Donc, plutôt, c'est une façon d'almost peut-être écho-ing, ou re-working those aerial views of the prologue, you know, where you hover, the camera hovers over the water, but here in this found footage taken from surveillance cameras on the bridge across the river, you also have this kind of looking down. So, there's a kind of echoing there. So, basically, this is a project I want to stress in three parts, each of which uses a different process. So, the prologue is made up of coloured sea prints, then the main body of the work there, these miraculous black and white hand-printed silver gelatin photographs, that's the main narrative, and then these digital prints in the coda. So, I think also not just different techniques, but this tripod structure in each of those parts, they invite a different mode of attention perhaps from us, they kind of orientate us differently in relation to the world. So, my question in relation to that structure is what it might be to think of an epic form now and how the Alrio Project as a project relates to a history of images and situates us, situates us as viewers in relation to it. And what's the measure? I want to ask what the measure is of such a long drawn out project understood in the sense of how long it made to make it and the rhythms of its installation and the overlapping temporalities that this project embodies. It's live, of course, in the sense that we can see the word on the screen, but of course it's not live at all except in the sense that it was live when the artist grabbed that image all along the matter of surveillance not only of looking but of being looked at of surveying and being surveyed is not just clear but as of course surveillance is inescapable, a given, a precondition. So, I'm trying to stress from the outset I want to really insist on the fact that the form the work takes mimics and acts out the course of the river that's to say the course of the project and the course of the Rio Grande sort of simulate and are entangled with one another even when the river itself isn't visible which very often it is not. The work has a pace which is less the pace of the water but ours as we follow it and as it meanders along and around the wall architecture not always of course but mainly pictures in a landscape format with that horizon line that's constantly present but also constantly shifting. And of course the camera too is directed not only at the water or even the river but banks to the side of it the infrastructure the land, the river passes through the sky much of which is desert but much of it is farmed and plowed as here much of it is militarised which touches on the way people live lives are led on the land adjacent to it and particularly on both sides but also draws attention to the migrations that cross it of both people and birds and the precarity of that relationship between multiple cultures and multiple landscapes so the project is about much more than the water but the water is what keeps it moving on its edges, its banks its infrastructure the urbanisation as much as the landscape a part of the life of this river just as the river is part of the lives of the people who live alongside it or want to cross it and the birds that pay no attention to a border between nations states the temporality of seasonal change I think is there too of the desert in flower for example in this small group of coloured photographs and there are other passages at night we pass through different times of day on occasions it's a bit like a clock seeing the light fade through the dark but in this little series there's something quite myopic in this sudden attention to the small the sudden looking down at the floor of the desert in this series as it literally blooms into colour there's something about the orientation of the look the looking down as you hike and Zoe Leonard is a hiker at the desert floor that is of course full rather than empty and having spent long periods of time especially during the pandemic and the making of this work in Marfa, Texas I think it's subject is clearly rooted there and in the politics of the border that's omniprésent there it's politics then and not only the politics of the Trump years during which it was made but also I think the fragility of nature at a time of planetary and climate crisis this intimate knowledge of that place that you can have when you walk in it when you walk in this landscape reminds me of via Selman's work there's a work she made at the end of the 1970s called to fix in the memory and she took several years to complete it so she collected these stones on her walks Selman's her walks along the Rio Grande in fact and then cast them in bronze and then painted them so as to make these kind of indistinguishable trompe-lois doubles of the natural stones or another artist that comes to mind here is Agnes Martin who was also an artist with an intimate knowledge of a desert landscape this is Agnes Martin's film one of only two films that she made this is from 1976 and it was a a 16mm film a strange film that she made following a 10 year old boy as he wanders through the new Mexico landscape where she lived and which begins at the water's edge I'm also reminded of Agnes Martin because Agnes Martin took a couple of years after a long trip up the Mackenzie River in Canada and this is an image of her taken by Donald Woodman this rather arduous journey that she made but there's something about an aesthetic or a poetics of a journey as Martin or Leonard moves through the landscape that resonates, I feel as well as that sense that Zoe Leonard certainly also has of emptying out the superfluous this insistent frontality you know, front facingness that she insists on so often the way Al Rio is both very immersive and seems so very often to block vision and kind of keep us out well and I'll talk in a moment about the way the Rio Grande project establishes a very complex relationship I think to the history of photography I don't want to underestimate that but I want to point first to what I feel is an important sensibility that Leonard has that's connected to certain forms of abstraction often serial but also of the kind of abstraction that we might associate with Agnes Martin this is of course not the first time that Zoe Leonard has made work that touches on questions of scale or that looks like landscape or that's concerned with migrations these have often been drivers of her work in earlier series like Analog the project that started with the shop fronts of the Lower East Side and end up in Cuba and Africa tracking the continental drift of the garment industry or you see I'm here after all a work that consisted of 4,000 vintage postcards of the Niagara Falls and so I just want to keep in mind the sheer scale of the Al Rio project as a project just as Analog was organized into chapters so the structure of Al Rio takes on not just a shape or expansive mode but works with the space that it's in and there's something I think incredibly rigorous and very sculptural about the way Zoe Leonard works that resonates for me anyhow much more with the kind of blocking and building that we might also associate with the conceptual artists like Hannah Darboven I'll come back to Darboven's vast installations later but first let me just go back to square one again if I may to think about how Zoe Leonard works with landscape and landscape has a pictorial mode and as a repository of conventions and the way her lens is always mediated by and sometimes very explicitly in conversation with the history of photography and over the course of hundreds of photographs she also lays out of course numerous possible ways of photographing a landscape that's deeply embedded in that history the river receding like train tracks through to the horizon or flowing through gorges and rocky landscapes as you can see in this sequence so the river has a complex history but so do its representations and the history of settlement in the United States is historically embedded and inextricably linked to its representations especially vividly in the work of photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan for example sorry this is Zoe and this is O'Sullivan who began to take photographs in the Civil War in the 1860s and who was part of the expeditionary forces making geological surveys and mapping the country as it expanded westward so partly this idea of an epic journey reaches back to the idea of the expedition and these great surveys pointing to pictures like this taken by O'Sullivan during his years with the Wheeler expedition surveying the 100th Meridian this is 1871 so trying to get at this association to the expedition and the survey and its relationship to present day surveillance implicit rather than explicit within Zoe Leonard's project likewise there are these amazing photographs by O'Sullivan where he includes the measuring some of the photographs you know measuring a rock the rock inscriptions in the landscape like this one Zoe Leonard doesn't include a measure of this kind but my question what is the measure of the work I think turns out to forces to think rather differently about how we measure these relations but it's these temporal and historical confluences or are they divergences that I'm particularly interested in especially the way this project puts pressure on what we know or what we can know about a river about land about water thinking about the scale of the project not in terms of how big it is or not simply how big it is but in terms of its measure you know how do we measure it by how long it is or what does it mean to ask about the time scale of a river we could think of this as the American epic mode even more so than perhaps the later Ansel Adams famous images of Yosemite I'm thinking about this kind of monumental landscape this is O'Sullivan again where you can see it's almost like a kind of classical temple carved out of the rocks this has been much discussed by photography historians but as a geological survey of course it's meticulously documented in terms of precise place date whether the camera is whether it looks up or down into the canyon these were part of the Colorado River and this one the title looking across the Colorado River to the mouth of Pariah Creek so I think we need to distinguish here perhaps between the monumental and the epic and within the epic we need to distinguish several different versions of that concept maybe Zoe Leonard has used herself the word epic to describe the project and I think there's room to think about the epic as distinct and different from the monumental and classicising even lens of O'Sullivan take the use of repetition as one of several strategies that deflate this soaring vertical axis you know the soaring canyons or cliffs of that Colorado River series that I just showed you her insistent flattening to the horizon the insistent lateral direction this is a relation of side by side metonymy if you like or adjacent that sustained through the project as kind of insistent pulse when Walter Benjamin wrote about epic theatre of the 1920s he thought of it as a project of a product rather sorry of the historical imagination in which Brecht was often reworking familiar say Shakespearean tropes but reworking them as an experiment in whether a historical event and its literary treatment might be made to turn out differently or at least be viewed differently if the processes of history were re-evaluated I'm interested then in this idea of reworking and so re-evaluating the processes of history it's a way of thinking about Zoe Leonard's embedding of historical references into her images as I say, not necessarily directly and sometimes very tangentially but it's sometimes hard not to see the presence of a particular photographer or another often for me at least the looming presence of Dorothy Lang whose work seems to loom large in Zoe Leonard's sonography not least in this work this is the church on the horizon beyond the furrowed field an image taken in Texas on the American side but the way it invokes at least in memory or seems to remember one image remembering another famous image of Dorothy Alang's tracted out from 1938 this iconic image that was taken in Childress County, Texas it was the same year that Dorothy Alang took that very famous photograph of the Highway 70 in the new no sorry I'm muddling myself it was the same year that she took a photograph of Highway 70 in the New Mexico desert and it's very reminiscent of that very famous, very iconic the road west that's a very well known photograph but these are the years when she's working for the farm security administration the years of the Great Depression she's documenting the lives of migrant workers and their families heading west to California and she photographed many versions of roads like this one without need of anything but this empty road extending into the distance you know the route many refugees cross was stipulated in the title so this idea of re-evaluation or reworking then is not so much I want to suggest a matter of influence so much as a critical engagement with the image and with a certain body of historical imagery I think you can think of it in terms of well I would invoke the word chronotope this idea of a kind of space time cipher of temporality as well as spatiality so marking a historical relationship between two images and I don't only mean Lang's present because of these famous images but something perhaps more substantive as well about the politics of seeing that Lang's work brings to the fore the drive to map the country as a terrain of migrations privations and economic displacement I want to be careful how I describe this relationship and I am using that word chronotope to describe not merely the recursive or repetitive motif or image but the historical shortfall perhaps or temporal relation which is a divergence as much as a confluence Zoe Leonard lays out a series of possibilities within landscape photography and you know I am not a historian of American photography and I as I say I don't think the point is to pick out her influences but none the less there are these moments within the project that seem to indicate that relationship for example here can they help but remind us of the picket fences of Paul Strand that then within Zoe Leonard's project becomes this kind of recursive sign that mutates into the militarized version of the border wall seen behind it at a distance and then kind of mutates into the concrete spikes of the border wall maybe the point is that it's impossible not to invoke such historical precedence against which our historical present also has to be measured or is measured so I'm trying to stress not sources or influences but could we think of it instead as a kind of layering of representations through which any attempt to map the Rio Grande and the border are historically mediated through you might wish it were different but you can't not in a way be mediated through the history of those representations and I think that also applies to the idea of the epic itself the epic form which traditionally invokes a journey whether it's Homer's Odyssey of homecoming or Zoe Leonard herself as referenced Ahab's you know great sea voyage in Herman, Melville's Moby Dick but the Rio Grande is of course for a long stretch a border too and this intensely fraught and highly militarized border crossing between the US and Mexico I mean what interests me I think is the intersecting of these different modalities where for instance you have the great movement of the river especially in the photographs that are shot in perspective that so powerfully invoke the metaphorics of a journey and the mythologies of course that attach to that and then these details that cut like the wall behind that picket fence that I just showed you or here the surveillance cameras or in another the small patch of white that emerges as a patrol car in another wise almost pastoral landscape there's a continually alternating rhythm that's to say as we move through the exhibition with shifting demands and shifting modes of attention required of us sometimes it's more like a swerve a sideways move to the looping tracks that run alongside the course of the river there are the kinds of detail or sideways moves the loopings back the tangents that slow viewing down that are the intricacies that prolong the narrative and puncture the traditionally elevated tone of the epic form and finally I want to say something about the conditions of display this flow through the wall architecture of the museum to recall again the fact that while Zoe Leonard uses photography and the work is mediated through a history of photographic representation clearly our Rio also invokes conceptual models such as Hannah Dubbovans the German conceptual artist whom I mentioned earlier not least in the way the serial accumulation of images has the effect of making one lose oneself in the project exacerbated in this extraordinary installation here where you have the two distinct parts doubling in a way the space and doubling or mirroring so one feels as if one kind of gets lost in the abyss between them the relationship in Dubbovans work between a sea of numbers a sea of found photographs these multiple temporal structures overlaid one upon the other that's very much Dubbovans terrain and although in a way the accretion you know there's much more there's much more loaded into one of Dubbovans installation I think the this is the installation of her cultural history show at Deer Beacon no it was in Chelsea wasn't it in 2017 but this is a work from the 1980s that consisted of 1500 framed works on paper as well as sculptural object a work that is both autobiographical as well as the history of post war Germany and although there's so much more accumulated in a Dubbovans installation I think that effect of excess is in a way something that resonates with Zoe Leonard's project here or also I'm thinking of Onkawara the Japanese American artist conceptual artist this is just a wall section of his date paintings also at Deer Beacon so Onkawara produced over 4000 date paintings over the course of his lifetime and the works arranged in a sequence although not necessarily in date order or there different ways of grouping these today paintings together in small parts or as far as possible in its entirety Onkawara painted these small monochromes and he painted the date on which he painted it if he didn't complete the painting he chucked it right he didn't produce one every day of his life there were intervals but the project has that sense of kind of massive longevity A Rio of course is striking for its lack of dates as I said earlier its lack of titles its lack of place names except insofar as they occur in the image itself so all the trappings of documentary photography that had certainly been the lifeblood of the FSA project of the 1930s or here what you have with Onkawara is all that remains in a way the date is all that remains of history painting or the history of painting all that's left is the date on which it's made but even though there are these differences there's something about the framing of Zoe Leonard's work that seems to me to be rooted in these seminal conceptual artists works that both began to work serially in the 1960s and they're both Dubovan and Onkawara of course conceptual artists who address the matter of time using complex strategies of expansion and reduction so the sheer scale of our Rio is a kind of charting or mapping of a journey which itself contains her labour over many years not only of shooting the images but then editing them down into the 500 or so that end up in the final work or as the work so I suppose we could say that this is an artwork in the long form for now rather than one which is nostalgic for epics of the past and for Zoe Leonard I think photography offers her a method of seeing that corresponds most closely with the epic form not as an elevated genre but rather because of several key features the sheer geographical scope as well as the time scale of the journey trope that can span very extensive periods of time the complex and intricate adjustments that break down the overarching narrative into smaller passages and episodes these are all key elements I think of the way she approaches narrative and the journey time of the work that we follow as we follow the course of the river the Rio Grande from Prologue to Coda is of course a fiction even at its most literal the journey made up of these was in fact made up of numerous small journeys in which Zoe Leonard concentrated on different segments of the river over a long period of time and not necessarily in the right order the schema is a given in the sense that there's a main flow of the narrative but it's constantly being broken up by deviations and distractions and the river anyhow has two banks so it's a narrative that also already has two sides to it and in actuality many more as the series proceeds so the action of the river unfolds against many different landscapes and geographies and the schematic construction as I've suggested could be described by the term chronotope maybe it's not that important but it's an interesting term that was introduced by the Russian theorist Bakhtin he developed it in the 1930s but now in the Soviet Union it's recently been taken up by art historians Huey Thompson Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson who are thinking about the recurrent iconographical motif in their reformulation of a black aesthetics but in Zoe Leonard's project I think the chronotope takes an epic form it takes aspects from the literary epic as I've noted maintaining in particular a degree of abstractness or distance which for Bakhtin was actually always integral to what he saw as the epic mode he thought the epic mode always had to contain a kind of boundary he says this boundary consequently is imminent in the form of the epic itself and is felt and heard in every word to destroy this boundary is to destroy the form of the epic as a genre I think what he means by that is a certain kind of distance a certain kind of resistance to empathy in the epic form as if this a certain kind of distance has to be built in to be necessary to sense rather than see the scale and I think Zoe Leonard's work can be situated then not only as a representation of the border but also as an exploration of these kinds of intersecting relationships she tests out all the time her own epic mode that both invokes and counters that model of expeditionary photography that I showed you and explores this ground this crucial ground between the historical survey and contemporary surveillance even the word explore that I find myself using or exploratory of course derives from uses of the words expeditions mapping and documenting the land as well as at the same time settling it displacing peoples colonizing it but the story of the river doesn't measure in a few hundred years of course but in millennia so that question of how to measure its course hovers over it as a question throughout Leonard's project one measure though not the only measure of course but the one that I want to end with which I think we should not lose sight of is the measure of the viewer or more precisely of the viewer's body hours as we move around through the work stop start perambulation through the installation the questions proliferate over the multiple viewpoints this striking and emphatic shift between the images that show the river receding perspectively into the distance and the ones that block vision where a fence or a wall or a bridge or a field of cows place a metaphorical kind of keep out sign on the possibility of our seeing beyond it let alone moving through it this is a to and fro I think between the possible and the impossible of movement and ampers that become a function of politics and of geography but of vision itself thank you I don't know if there is any questions in the audience maybe I can start I will be happy if you could talk a little bit more about how you see the sequences of images in the work for me it's a quite new development in the work of Zoe and I know that you worked a lot you thought a lot about sexuality in your producer maybe you could talk about I mean one of the things that really struck me when I looking at the exhibition itself and how strong the short series are how important they are and my own collation of images for this talk where I sort of wanting to show you this kind of panoramic range and scope of the project had kind of drawn images from here and there and not just concentrated in these really tight little sequences one particular minisequence or miniseries that struck me that could be seen as a exemplary serial progression in some ways was not so much the one of the bridges but the one of the birds and the horizon where I only have two of them but if you look you can see that the height of the horizon staggers down in a serial progression in some ways a quite explicit reference to certain modalities of seriality that are just as historically grounded as the photographs of Timothy O'Sullivan kind of grounding a certain kind of landscape photography and so I think that is definitely there in the work I wouldn't see it necessarily as a new development because I definitely associate that serial method with Zoe Leonard's work partly because I suppose photography itself is serial in a sense it's necessarily works through repetition or through a series of photographs the mechanical process of photography has been seen to be serial I think what comes out for me very strongly and what she makes very vivid or perhaps dramatizes about a serial method or how series work these groups of images is how much they're actually to do not with a progression but with how much has to be taken out in the process and in the installation that you have here I think as I understand it she took a lot of work out but I think we can absolutely understand that editing process of how a work becomes a work is as much to do with what is taken out of it as put into it and it seemed to me that what she really drew my attention to make me think about was how much series depend not on accumulation but on the removal you know to really prune to really edit to really make a series that's so spare and there are often groups of four or five or more aren't they that provide a very there's definitely a rhythm it's almost I mean it's so complicated I think as we loop back through you know we're moving through but then we'll notice there's the use of repetition which of course is a function of seriality but then a new detail will emerge and you know that patrol car will emerge within a series or be displaced and I think she's using so many different perspectives and ways of shooting this her kind of scenography it seems to me but you often have a very similar scene but obviously the dogs will be in a slightly different position so there are many stories in one sense but you know stories without a story in effect how could we really know or very memorable I think is the bathing sequence of the Mexican families that take the cars down to the you know that the banks of that very urbanised section of the river but there's this kind of informality of the way these bodies of the children are you know swimming and so that sense of the groups these many sequences that she has being necessary to encapsulate I think not anthologise this panorama but create these different rhythms sometimes concern very much with the ordinary the mundane aspects of life I think there's something very deflationary about it because when you have four or five images that are very similar and kind of string at you know they stretch out the horizon through repetition in effect you really have this you know you absolutely refuse that sort of elevated tone I think so I think it has to do with the movement the discontinuities the rhythms of this flow that is necessarily broken and I think that for that in order for her to maintain that and keep that drive within the work this approach to seriality is sort of fundamental to what she does you could see sometimes a sort of you know Smith's and staggering forms you know there's a level of abstraction that's really intense isn't there some ten years ago you wrote an essay about the work of Zoé Donard it was for her show at the Camden Art Centre non sorry I'm just I'm not following I think it's my four maybe you ask you to if you could make some connections between this project and another project her camera obscura work at the she presented ten years ago at the Camden Art Centre which was also about landscape I was thinking about that no I'm not sure whether people this series a number of camera obscuras that she has made including one I believe at Marfa that I never saw yes so I mean I'm not sure I can answer it in a I was I think in a way certainly has to do with the historicity of photography and always insisting on the histories of photography it's kind of photography's own self-referential origin stories but I think also this sense that she's done several so the use of repetition in the work you know you can see those as individual artworks but you can also see them as a body of work you could put them all together so that sense between this you know difference between the singular and the multiple I think that's very much something that's going on here as well there's something about a camera obscura of course that captures in this very strange 360 degree space or you know this sense of being surrounded by the projected image that I think for me it just you know this preoccupation with shaping or form making that here the key driver is horizontality there's something very self-mimicking about it whereas in a camera obscura of course you're making a very you're sculpting space in a very different way and using photography to create this total environment and I think through exploring the different possibilities of photography and its history she's exploring different ways of form making different ways of envisaging the world or representing the world to us I think I also made a connection with this notion of chronotope that you developed these artworks are very much about diamond space of course absolutely I don't know if there is any thank you, thank you so much this was really lovely to hear you give us these descriptions I want to ask you about some images that you showed at the beginning you called them the Kodak works I'm very curious about how you situate these works within what you've described as the epic or the narrative of the entire body particularly because in my sort of naive reaction to the works as a whole those moments where we see the bodies moving across what I believe is a bridge really kind of corrupts this horizontality that you've described as sort of the modus that Leonard works through so I'm very curious about how you read these within the narrative of the piece as a whole or perhaps if there's any sort of precedent in Leonard's work for this kind of moment of scale shift or even a temporal shift that seems to happen with these parts of work the koda where she's using this footage that she discovered the kind of shocking surveillance footage that she accesses and then photographs on her own computer screen on an iPhone I for me I felt they were very much a way of I don't really want to say breaking the fiction because I think they're as intensely part of it as any other part of the the work but I think this sense that she doesn't want to end she certainly doesn't want to end with the with the waves on the beach does she how would you end this I mean I think part of her approach to the project is something about a project never really being completed yeah so I think you know how to bring the work to a close is something that she there might have been many different alternatives that she might have pursued or thought about I mean this seemed to me to end with a sort of a shock almost a shock that that that such surveillance perhaps this is naive in a way but that such surveillance could be accessed could be shown to us in this way you know and the shock also that she's clearly avoided or there's very little figurative presence there are little figures and they're often as she herself made very clear there they're in the distance because she doesn't want to reveal who these people are they may be there as she said I think in that conversation with Suzanne Cotter you know they may be there for many reasons that she's you know does not want to reveal but then you suddenly have these figures don't you that are in a totally different kind of tone modality and of course in colour again as I said I saw it almost echoing the you know the patterns of circulation in the prologue but perhaps that's in some ways it's the divergence and the clarity of the surveillance process that is important there you know it's in a way the rawness of that not raw in the sense that it's immediate it's far from it I mean it's kind of doubly triply mediated isn't it through the various screens but there's something of that kind of shock that makes it clear the politics of this piece I think in a way there's no doubt about how there's something going through it you veer from these astonishingly beautiful photographs to something much more like the terror and I think it's almost the mundane way in which people are just kind of going about their lives in that final coda isn't it you know they're just going about their business but here they are you know kind of on captured on these surveillance cameras so I you know I think in a way it's a very strong end but I think in a way photographically the project belongs elsewhere you know I mean I think aesthetically it belongs elsewhere Any other question? It's time to thank you so much Thank you very much Indeed, time for those questions Thank you