À la Recherche du Sable Perdu / A Dust Grain Journey
Archive box with a folded print, 2015
Cloth-bound archive box, 36.5 × 40 × 15 cm Lambda print, 2 × 3 m, on Hahnemühle paper
Dust is the smallest object a film can deal with. Particles with a diameter of 0.1 millimetres. That is the threshold above which the world becomes visible for the naked eye. — Hartmut Bitomsky
A 2 × 3 metre print, folded to fit a cloth-bound archive box. The image has been enlarged until the line between a grain of sand and the grain of the film disappears: what you see is no longer the desert but the film itself, dust on a transparent base.
The title borrows from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, a book that broke with straight, linear storytelling. The box does something similar to the photograph. It can only be seen in parts, one fold at a time.