unrepresentable
transcendent reality,
a night impossible to frame.
derust the soul
and the brain,
revitalize our eyes.
I don’t feel it,
was it the right dose?
to photograph the night is to realize that
reality can be never taken,
that reality is present only as an atmosphere.
it’s a vision our eyes are not able to show us:
into the night,
sounds become silhouettes and contours take shape;
transparency becomes opacity
and light is no longer there to reveal but to
g o b b l e up
everything she meets.
how can I share the magic
of the night…
…with those who live by day?
derealize to realize better,
photography is the chemistry that allows the feeling,
the memories of the night
to try and come forward.
photographic chemistry,
night chemistry;
brain chemistry.
manipulating my photographs
caught in the euphoria of the night,
I shift,
I dig,
I seek,
chased by the transmutation I run from.
a race against time,
a race against chemistry,
against revelation by destruction
and against revealing destruction.
I integrate and disintegrate.
silver scales,
a network of thin lines like silk thread,
a simulacrum of veins and stiff arteries,
the most fragile ones metallize,
while others create tiny crystals.
happenstance, chaos, odds or fate;
I see in this metallic deposit,
the reflection of a phantom revolution that,
on a microscopic scale,
keeps repeating the same pattern.
an image becoming another image.
convicted victim of the elements,
she trembles,
she reverberates,
about to melt and dry out.
t r a n s m u t a t i o n ,
s i m u l a c r u m ,
intrinsically linked in the quest for time:
alchemy,
delirious mother of photography
the transcendence, whatever its object,
can only gain momentum if it first steps back;
and that legitimize
in the eyes of a dreamer,
the degradation of the substance,
the deep, intimate material corruption.
it’s a dialectical process:
to soil in order to clean
to corrupt in order to regenerate
to lose in order to save
to get lost in order to save ourselves.
to destroy to create.
therefore photography is not the image of a performance;
it’s the performance of an image.
I behold her,
I venture,
and I get lost.
__________
Sara Bensaltana is a French-Spanish artist who lives and works between Toulouse and Tokyo. She graduated with honors from a bachelor and then a master in fine arts at the Institut Supérieur des Arts et du Design de Toulouse in June 2023. She has also studied at The Fynske Kunstakademi in Denmark. With a scientific background prior to her art education, she integrates her passion for science into her approach of photography, chemistry, and her exploration of sensitive surfaces. The essence of her practice lies in the pursuit of light and pushing back the boundaries of the photographic medium, seeking to reveal the boundary that separates the visible from the invisible.
Sara’s work, FASTLIFE, was commissioned as an Experiment for Photomonitor (2024), all images and text copyright the artist.
