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Joaquin Stacey-Calle

Fermenting my Selves

July 1-31, 2024
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If you are looking at Joaquin Stacey-Calle’s Proxy work on a computer or cell phone screen, you are seeing a digital photographic representation of his process. It lacks smell, touch and taste, and gains the properties of visual exposé. He starts with a plexiglass container filled with water, salt, some Ecuadorian bananas and a color photo of his face printed on paper (icons and objects he considers as part of the history of the Americas.) Together they ferment over time and are videoed each day. The result is a sped up video made of a process that lasts a month. The printed photograph is also fermenting in the juices and is the one element that makes the resulting pulp non-edible. Stacey-Calle says that he is “collaborating with the landscape,” and here “landscape” does not mean nature or landscape in general and does not mean the opposite of cities. He considers his own picture to be a landscape.

The decay of the photograph together with the bananas is key to the understanding of Stacey-Calle’s awareness of the multiple layers of representation. The paper that the photograph is printed on is just as much a chemically “alive” compound as the other elements. The photograph is a still, fixed image but it is subjected to a fluid process, thus raising issues of stillness versus movement and entropy.

Stacey-Calle believes that the bacteria resulting from fermentation insert life back into monoculture. Through controlled decay he aims to reconstruct a life away from the simplified, neat and clean idea of “nature.” Paradoxically, the digital video on your computer screen or phone is another level of sanitization, not unlike supermarket cheeses in refrigerated vitrines. The process of fermentation gradually destroys the image, but the new image of the process keeps getting re-processed in a digital fashion. It becomes an exteriorization of the digestive process inside the body, a kind of pre-digestion.

After all the pickling that intervened, the final visual experience is strange. That is because Stacey-Calle’s work does not make decay or the abject the central element in his message; but it is not irrelevant either, hence this video performance of objects.

Needless to say that looking at the video on the screen you are also looking at the wooden frame of the Proxy Gallery itself, its size, scale and the plexiglass box built to contain the wet elements and protect the Gallery. The front plexiglass wall is another screen that allows seeing the work as a kind of fish tank. I.e., fermentation here is spectacle—but the spectacle is itself interrupted by video techniques such as close-ups of bubbles or screens within the screen. Does this aggregation of procedures add to or subtract something from your visual experience?

Finally, the video work itself is a visual syllogism whose end is conventionalized on your screen. Representation is treated as what it represents: The picture is mortal in the same way as the person. In this sense the work is both speculative science and fiction.
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