"The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event".
Roland Barthes
The first thing my camera eye took in: cemeteries with their mournful statues and melodramatic epitaphs, junky squats riddled with graffiti, satanic pentagrams, wasted aluminium wraps, abandoned production sites, several “rave” spaces after the event, and last but not least, abandoned industrial sites/warehouses that still populate here and there the urban field of our sprawling cities…
Cemeteries, urban wastelands, warehouses, derelict spaces and squats: one could call them wastetopias, to borrow from Foucault’s anti-utopia notion of disjunctive spaces: Heterotopias. These wastetopias are my gothic fascination.
Whilst Foucault’s spaces are based on the hetero function of certain spaces in a grander social space, which are heterogeneous or other to the grander space in which they find themselves imbedded, my waste-spaces, are former spaces of life which have been laid or put to waste, “deathsized” so to speak. But Thanathos calls for Eros. The image of Eros framed within the urban frames of Death - the capturing of these two aesthetic forces in one form-image.
Kate K (or double K) had surged from various K Holes, and wanted to be sane again; can’t quite imagine why escaping from an dissociative anaesthetic would entail taking up the aesthetics of photography…maybe as she surmised, the photographic image is a safe and cool point: space and time do not move. A good excuse as any, I guess.
Of course the moving image (i.e. cinema) is drugged time all on to itself, as Gilles Deleuze purports to "argue". Cinema is time on drugs. As it turned out, we both hated cinema, we preferred the “real” thing (unlike uncle Gilles who preferred the sitting on your ass screen approach to life). The moving image, we both suspected, was, as all good Bergsonians know, a fiasco - the moving image does not really move, it’s made out of discrete stills!!!! And what double K needed, was exactly that, stills – to still her life. No more Ks would be added to her name. "Stills" to stop the K madness surfacing again; she had to stop the pull of the vortex K Hole from surging; for Alice was always waiting with her rabbits and Cheshire smiles to take her down to Kwonderland…what a naughty girl,, sweeet Alice…
When I first meet my K, she was adjusting her camera, not quite knowing what F stops meant, or what the fuck lens to use or not….“let’s stop the charade” I whispered….The order of things finally restored, the female principle has become muse. The White Goddess has not left our sunken world. Her frail frame would be framed.
She was a frail creature, whether by design or by intoxication she did not say, with sunken eyes, trembling lips and a whiter shade of pale skin…cute in a sort of wasted way. The contrast was from another world, behind the lens she was magic; she became more embodied, fuller and her frail limbs restored to a higher aura of life: in which7 the wasted looks combined with a hard lusciousness...that would have made even the angels weep of cum…
The camera eye followed her every move, and my eyes became possessed by an image from another world. Was this the same double K? Or I’m I on liquid K? The flashing flashes kept my questions at bay. I pursued her across wasted land,.. her poses were a tropical provocation to the derelicts around her. Her lips were pouting a hyper-Bardot aura of unbridled erosia amidst ruins of desperate desolation…Eros and Thanathos all in one images…
