The theoretical concept The Action was articulated through five works of art in South Africa, 1999-2002. It has since then been reformulated and today I call the working method:
Actualization - It's not the image of an event that count, it's also the event. It's not only what happens in the image, it's also what happens to the image.
I do not take photographs, they are offered to me, in the encounter. We tell our stories to each other because we choose to; maybe out of necessity or because we just enjoy meeting the other person. In any situation it's a trust we show to each other, a trust to communicate a story that can be more or less personal.
We have images of each other in any relationship. In every encounter with another individual we share our images; one way or another, little or much. These are affected by the social situations in which they occur, they are an actualization of old images and there is also something new created.
A dialogue / exchange of images / can develop in three ways, as I see it:
- We exchange monologues. We learn a little bit more about the other person.
- We exchange information and we get to know the answers of our questions.
- We communicate our knowledge in such a way that we start to build something in the space between us, something that we could not have made ourselves.
The story or the images exist between us and it's my job as a visual artist to develop and mediate, to activate the images. In this way the aesthetics are not fully controlled by the artist. Also I can't sell these images without a mutual agreement between us.
Soweto 2000