In-Transparency & Opacity

If we “examine” the process of understanding people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgements. I have to reduce. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

The exhibition came out of a year of travel and living in the Dominican Republic, Denmark, Brazil, Marseille and Berlin. It follows two words, transparency and opacity, through photography, through Édouard Glissant’s writing on language and through the work of Marguerite Duras.

Transparency is how the Western world makes “the Other” fit its own standards. Glissant answered with a right to opacity: the right not to be understood on someone else’s terms, and to be misunderstood if need be. The work started with a failure. On the beach in Santo Domingo, the first capital of the New World, my camera could not make a usable photograph. The place would not fit the camera’s standards.