Statement

How can we record light through material? What happens when we think of a building as a ‘camera’? How does sunlight affect the way we perceive and understand spatial relations, dimensions of time, place, proximity and absence? These are the questions that drive our collaborative project ‘under the same sun’. We are working with the early photographic blueprint process. Non-toxic and with long exposure times, this process allows us to capture light on a 1:1 scale with multiple and long exposures of hours to weeks. The blueprint process is an accessible medium that we use to create artworks in which collaborative workshops – or ‘light recording’ sessions – have become an integral part. In these workshops we share our working methods, and we invite people to join us in capturing sunlight. We often work in a series of ‘light recordings’, using scale models of buildings and the actual location as our analogue recording devices, creating unique photograms of light. Light and shadow are translated into blue and white formations of a universal nature. At the same time, we find that each location has its own conditions, which influences the making. ‘under the same sun’ describes the obvious and the immediate, that what all locations have in common is the same sun that shines on them every day. Working with sunlight over days and weeks makes the movement of the earth around the sun visible and tangible. Visible as photographic material and tangible as a physical experience in the making. The record and recording both share the experience of space over time, registered in and by light.