Traces of a Traumatic Future: GOLDEN THREAD GALLERY Belfast

Traces of a Traumatic Future is a solo show at Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast. This exhibition features a series of black and white analogue photographs of Taiwan’s coastline, seen as places shaped by political tension and uncertainty.

In this new work, I continue my exploration of the opposite of the instantaneous, employing a slow, contemplative, and emotionally charged photographic practice to wander around questions concerning time. This work embarks on a desperate quest, searching for traces of a future that may never come to pass, yet which nonetheless has an insistent presence in the present. I grapple with this paradox, which is not current in the real world, but manifests first in a theoretical dimension, then in an emotional one, through a feeling of anxiety. The work is thus situated within a constant preoccupation with the future in a geopolitical context, and embraces the uncertainty of the world in which we live.

Taiwan lives under an existential threat: the possibility of invasion by the People's Republic of China in the coming years. For the people of this island, the question of the future seems of paramount importance, being indeed uncertain and dependent on social, economic, and political conditions, not only locally but also internationally. Conversely, the potential implications of Taiwan's future are not only significant for the nation itself but also have global geopolitical repercussions.

Considered a fortress, this island would offer only a few beaches where an amphibious invasion could take place. I then decide to observe the coastal landscape from these beaches and their surroundings, from these hills often dotted with tunnels and bunkers. I position these spaces as metaphorical bearers of potential trauma or as points of vulnerability within the natural geography. Through a black-and-white aesthetic, shot with a large-format camera and contact printed using the 19th-century Platinum Palladium process, analogue photographs seek to draw the viewer into contradictory movements (pull and push), fostering a sense of distance and theatricality, where different subjectivities and interpretations intertwine.

The relationship between conflict and photography is long-standing and often prompts questions about the nature of time. Due to long exposure times, as exemplified by Roger Fenton’s well-known images of the Crimean War, early war photographs were taken after the fact, recording the traces of the event through bleak landscapes. A certain approach to contemporary photography returns to these slower practices in a desire to capture more complex truths and explore the relationship between the photographic image and memory, particularly in its relation to the trace (the index).

A number of image theorists argue that photography is analogous to trauma, which is itself a response to an event not fully absorbed at the time and which returns in the form of flashbacks, nightmares, and other compulsive and repetitive phenomena. This view was already supported by Walter Benjamin, who considered the camera as an open, unfiltered eye. Photography, especially the analogue image, has a complex connection to the reality it depicts. It is always dual, being both an iconic representation and a trace, and, in this way, replicates the structure of the psyche when confronted with a traumatic experience, while also incorporating the timeless dimension of the unconscious. Anxiety can be linked to the manifestation of the psychological effects of trauma, whereby the decisive moment is indefinitely suspended. And indeed, at the heart of trauma lies the notion of delay. It is this reversed delay that, ultimately, the project looks at: a delay that concerns us all.

Traces of a Traumatic Future continues my sustained inquiry into the unstable ground between visibility and invisibility, past and future, and the political and the intimate.