MARI AMMAN, ALLUVIAL

Alluvial (Ruisseau Holocene), 2018, film photography, 140 x 100 cm, 101,6 x 68,14 cm. Alluvial is a series of photographs imaging time as spirits formed in sediments of sand. The series reflects on how humans perceive concepts related to the psychology of nature and time. Ruisseau means river or stream, and Holocene is the current epoch in which we live. Alluvial residues are deposited over time in the Norwegian Lofoten islands. The endless streams of changing formations are imprinted onto analogue film, and intended to be materialised into textiles.

The concept of time has held my attention along with questions of determinacy and faith, free-will and fate. In my artistic process and way of being, I have to take long walks. I have often used the camera as a tool to guide the often overwhelming experience of living with synesthesia. Sometimes I can go for walks with a companion that understands I cannot speak the whole time because of the way I perceive time and sensory input. The medium of photography remains one of my favourite forms of communication for its sensitivity to protecting, as well as influencing, the imaginary and sublime realms of life.

When I came upon these visions in Lofoten, I was overwhelmed with the stories of time coming through the sediments of the rocks. The imaginary stories in these moments became about the souls being magnetically drawn through the moving poles of the earth and washing down the side of the mountain as sediments of life. This reorganising of forms throughout magnetics, time and sand uses the visual landscapes as a means of analysing the ways interior and exterior terrains convene. This making, unmaking, and making again mirrors the notions of cyclic magnetic currents within the geological sciences or forces orchestrated beyond human reach, or perhaps current human consciousness.

As Rorschachian frames, the realm of the imagination is invited to open up. There are no right or wrong imagined stories. As imagination itself is woven with reality, analogue impressions impart an expediency of the primary gateway to discernment, or choice. The images do not say, how we see is how we are: instead images conjure questions of what we see and how that is influenced by ideas. I want to get more direct contact with the subtle realms laying behind or beneath, streaming through forms of materials and consciousness.

While the images point to the perception understood in contemporary paradigms as pareidolia, I wish to present these images in the interest of exploring societal configurations, such as the relationship to the etheric realms where sensorial and supra-sensorial entities were accepted as real as any other density of life. Densities of life, from an animistic understanding realises a pathology of imaginary perception with a different point of inflexion: meaning instead of taboo and subjugated or classified and aggrandised, there is a middle way right here and now. Through a sober joining of imagination and the sublime, the viewer is invited to step toward the-real through the experience of looking.

Furthermore, I continue wondering what logic or systemic ideas proliferating a misunderstanding that humanity has in place that reinforces the loss of biodiversity through the war with the imaginary realm (right/wrong consciousness).

Gualandris, J., Branzei, O., Wilhelm, M., Lazzarini, S., Linnenluecke, M., Hamann, R., Dooley, K. J., Barnett, M. L., & Chen, C.-M. (2023). Unchaining supply chains: Transformative leaps toward regenerating social–ecological systems. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12314