In conversation with Eleni Wittbrodt
To start at the very beginning: Where does the title “Twice is real” come from?
The words are borrowed from the lyrics of a jazz piece I came across while making the work. I was thinking about repetition and how two versions of the same thing relate to one another. Photography is closely connected to sequencing, duplicating and revisiting. A photographic image is like a rhyme of a past situation: it depends on that moment having happened. At the same time, it is often the act of recording that makes a moment feel important, or even real in the first place.
You describe a sole’s relationship with the ground as a “continuous negotiation of touch.” How does that physical, everyday contact translate into the way you do photographic contact printing?
Walking is a kind of accidental printmaking. When I was invited to respond to paracia’s archive, I became most interested in the shoe soles. They are the points of contact between a body and the ground. Esther Gatón’s exhibition text describes beautifully how repeated pressure leaves marks on both surfaces: soles become dirty and scratched, while the ground is imprinted and worn. But if you have a muddy shoe, has the ground printed itself onto you, or are you preparing to print onto the ground? How can a thing be both a result and a starting point, an end and a beginning, a print and a matrix? This oscillation became a guiding principle for the work.
On a practical level, what did making this work actually look like in your studio routine? Since lumen prints rely on sun exposure, how much did weather conditions shape the production of these pieces?
The processes I work with are always shaped by my location and the circumstances of production. The lumen prints only made sense to produce in Madrid, where sunlight is an extremely accessible resource. I placed shoes directly onto sheets of photographic paper and left them in daylight. Over several hours, the light slowly produced an image: the exposed areas became darker fields around the shapes of the shoes, like a tan. There is limited control over that process and the image kind of creates itself. But I wanted the work to keep moving, so I brought these prints back to my studio in Glasgow, where I continued in the darkroom. Using the lumen prints as large paper negatives, I placed them face down onto new photographic paper and exposed the two layers together. In a second reversal, the resulting positive images were then copied once more to return to negatives. With each step, the shapes became less clear and the texture of the paper more visible. The work moves between outdoors and indoors, daylight and darkroom, colour and black-and-white, Spain and Scotland, while contact and scale remain constant throughout.
Your journey spans both Kunsthochschule Mainz in Germany and the Glasgow School of Art. How have these different environments influenced the way you experiment with materials and time?
Mainz was a place for open-ended experimentation. The art school was small and permeable, so although I studied sculpture and film, I spent most of my time in the analogue photography lab. Nobody asked me to make sense of this, which was useful for learning to trust a non-linear process. Then I moved to the Glasgow School of Art, which was much larger and denser. Accessing a darkroom had previously only involved asking for a key; now it required an induction, a booking, a time slot and a payment. I needed to name more precisely what I wanted to do, which was useful for learning to trust my ideas too. I realised that material experimentation and my use of DIY methodologies are not incidental, but have a conceptual function.
How does your artistic interest respond to the different contexts you work in?
Contexts can be very different, but working as an artist always allows me to ask all sorts of questions. At paracia, for example, I was drawn to the archive of complaints and repair requests. Shoe production involves multiplication, but each pair eventually enters someone’s life, where it ages in a unique way — which brings us back to the question of how two versions of the same thing relate to one another.
