Jan Verwoert
Past Passages
Closed To Open
No Sooner than Now
Souvenirs are not unlike passports. They are more then just a
thing, image or text. They are something you bring when you go
somewhere. So they have a lot to do with a moment of passage.
The passport allows you to pass into another country or prohibits
youfrom doing so. The souvenir is what you take with you when you
return from your travels. It shows that you passed through
another country in the past, and thereby opens a passage in time
back to the moment when you passed through that passage in space
that your passport opened up. It shows what came to pass. And it
permits you to pass that memory on to someone else, to the person
to whom you give the souvenir as a present — or to the person, a
stranger maybe even, who, perhaps entirely by chance, comes into
the possession of the souvenir after you have passed away, leaving
him or her with the evidence of a past passage, of which it might
not even be clear where it led, but of which it can safely be said
that it was undertaken.
What to do with such a souvenir when you come into its
possession by chance? Can the passage, once undertaken in the
past, be repeated in the present? The place to which the passage
led may after all still be there. What if that place were where
you yourself live now? Then the souvenir is a door that leads to
where your home is. It stands wide ajar. You recognize what it
shows because it is where you are. But, even if you know you know
the place the door opens onto, this still gives you no guarantee
that you could actually pass through the passage in time and reenter the place as it once was. In fact that place may have
changed so much during the time that passed since the door was
last opened, that the door no longer leads somewhere but nowhere,
really. It's the weirdest thing when a souvenir, precisely because
it evokes the past of a place so effectively, affects you with a
sense of not knowing whether you can ever return to the place in
the past in which you presently find yourself.
It's unsettling enough to take a souvenir back to the place
from which it came. Stranger even, if you find the souvenir in the
country which it was from. Did it ever leave? Never leave? Or was
it brought back by someone who decided to return? If so, is it
some kind of homecoming then? Home to a land to which someone once
travelled? Which ceases to be foreign upon the traveller's return?
Or a land which seems ever more foreign because what the souvenir
shows it once to have been it no longer is, now, that you find
the souvenir there?
I ask these questions in response to a series of photographs
by Orit Ishay, "1917" (2011-2012). They show pages from a small
book originally produced in 1917 to honour the British Army upon
its conquest of the Holy Land, and intended to be offered as a
souvenir. Each page is made up of a composition of local flowers
or ferns, collected, dried and pressed flat on the paper.
Most compositions are strictly ornamental, with fern leaves opening
up in intricate patterns around flower petals, but one adds a cross
made from what may be a type of grass, to assure the souvenir’s
recipients, who may have been Mandate officials, British soldiers
or occasional tourists to Palestine, that yes, indeed the country
they visited is their holy land too.
To say that Ishay's photos 'show' these floral compositions
may not be enough, however. In re-photographing the pages, twodimensional as they are, in close up, Ishay much rather re-produces,
re-presents, re-articulates what they are. And as her large
photographic prints considerably magnify the postcard-size pages,
she renders every single detail of their composition not just
visible, but hypervisible. The materiality of the dried flowers
and ferns becomes so pronounced in the process of their being rephotographed and enlarged that in a strange sense the photograph
seems as real, if not more real, than the original. When I saw them
for the first time I took them for what they look like and looked at
them as something composed for the camera, now, today, out of faded
flowers, before I realized they were pictures of something other
than themselves.
Or are they?
For that is the crux that Ishay's works frame so poignantly: When
the souvenir was made, the images inside may have been born out of
their maker's imagination, transforming reality into an ornament
that, as an ornament, first and foremost speaks about its own form
and composition. Yet, as artefacts produced in 1917, thes
compositions also document the historic political reality of a
country under colonial rule, in which British subjects were offered
things to remind them of where they had been. But did they ever
grasp where they'd been? Was the country they ruled any more real
in their understanding than a composition of flowers and ferns is
to the viewer's eye today? It may have been as real as the flowers
and ferns are. Because they are as real as the place was. And is.
But they may also have been as unreal, or real, as a picture is to
a man daydreaming. Did they ever see where they were? Do we see it
now when we look at what undeniably are the material relics of a very
particular moment of history?
Their passports got them there. Their souvenirs should have gone
back with them. The fact that at least one, the book from which Ishay
took her shots, stayed behind, may therefore open a door to the
Palestine that may once have existed in history, a place of many
flowers. Or conversely show, that it was what the rulers at the time
would have liked to imagine it to be, a composition to confirm their
taste. So perhaps the door to a different future fell shut already
back then, and the passage is closed. Or not. In which case the shapes
of flowers and ferns which were there then, as they are there now,
open a passage and with no passports required, make you pass over to
the place that Palestine was and is.
Jan Verwoert, Ox-Bow, Michigan 2012