Identifying the raw material that lies behind the representation is not only a way of considering our images against the distant echo of an economic context but also of questioning how the gaze travels over the surface of these material forms. Daphné Le Sergent

For many of today’s visual artists, the use of images goes far beyond the issues of representation and no longer refers solely to the field of optics. These artists approach the image as a ground for research into our relationship with the world, in terms of parameters and considerations that are partly outside the field of art. The work of Daphné Le Sergent in this open arena is a sensitive and conceptual immersion into the depths of the image, in the true sense of the word, from which she poses questions of an artistic, as well as a political and ecological nature. Developing a hybrid practice that combines photography and drawing, video and installation, and sometimes sound, her method develops a particular approach to the image, its materiality, from which she addresses questions about the relationship between image, memory and writing. We can also consider that Daphné Le Sergent is one of those artists who, distancing themselves from digital technology, are interested in the substance of photography and traditional processes.

Defected Times is Daphné Le Sergent’s first exhibition in Belgium. It presents two sets of works, based on two parallel narratives on traditional film photography and the digital image, two episodes in a fable about memory that has image as its central focus.

Approaching the image from the perspective of its materiality means raising the question of its relationship with the immateriality of memory. Approaching the image as a material object is to drive a wedge into its history, a history that postulates the transparency of photography in the face of reality, and where today most images are digital and virtual. Approaching the image from a materialist perspective means seeing it as existing on earth and therefore envisaging its disappearance. The extinction of the image through the exhaustion of the raw material that constitutes it is the fiction on which Daphné Le Sergent’s work has been based in recent years.

The video L’image extractive (The Extractive Image) puts forward the hypothesis that photography was not born with the invention of heliography by Nicéphore Niepce in 1824, nor with the technical progress of the industrial revolution. Rather, its origin would be linked to the conquest of the New World in the 16th century, to the intensive exploitation of mining resources, particularly silver, and the speculative flows generated by the market economy. When, in the 19th century, silver was replaced by gold as the standard metal for currencies and trade, its price collapsed. Its wide availability at a low cost would then have allowed the massive diffusion of silver photography.

Another element of this fiction, the Codex de 2031 (Codex 2031), is a disturbing simulacrum of an archaeological object, one of the first compendiums of humanity, written in hieroglyphic script and in which the Mayan civilization encoded its memory before being eradicated by the arrival of the Europeans. This work in the form of a leporello predicts the rarefaction and disappearance of silver ore shortly, and therefore of silver photography. Daphné Le Sergent brings to light the tensions between history, reality and the imaginary. She disguises fiction in a scientific archaeological discourse while giving it the allure of mythical narratives. She thus suggests an alternative interpretation of the history of photography, a more critical one, no longer linked to the progress of modernity but to the conquests and ravages wrought by Western civilisation.

This fictional framework enables Daphné Le Sergent to create works that explore the relationship with memory. The series La préciosité du regard et le désir des choses rares (The preciousness of the gaze and the desire for rare things) represent fragments of landscapes that conjure up a romantic and exotic imaginary world of the pioneers and the first precious metal miners.

With her “photo drawings”, Daphné Le Sergent invents a unique form of plastic writing that combines the techniques of photo transfer and pigment inkjet printing with the painstaking manual work of drawing with graphite. Zones of various resolutions are created. The pencil fills in the gaps in the image where the transfer exhausts the silver ore. The loss of information and the degradation of the photographic image exist side by side with the abstraction and subjectivity of the pencil drawings. The photo loses its transparency and the opacity of the act of drawing gains. Two different viewing perspectives appear, a dialectical tension is created and an inner image is created.

Such an image implies a particular experience, as it forces the gaze to (re)construct itself by bringing into play vision and imagination, optics and tactile perception. Two notions of perception meet: on the one hand, a Cartesian conception based on the photo, the sense and the representation, and on the other hand, a physiological conception based on the imprint and the degradation. Two notions of memory intersect: the one carried by the objectivity of the photo and the one embodied by the sensory experience.

While the demise of traditional photography was a real effacement from Western memory, Daphné Le Sergent puts forward the idea that a new space for tactile and sensitive experience would open up in this void. Every image is thus a perceptual canvas between the given and the sensory, information and experience, the tangible and the speculative.

Another narrative about the demise of images underpins a second group of works. In the exhibition, we move from one work to the next like an explorer discovering the remains of a forgotten civilisation. Heliographs, photo drawings and an intriguing “photo novel” gradually reveal images of traces of human exploitation, ruins and mysterious remains. The heliographs in the Prose de circuit imprimé (Printed Circuit Prose) series are photographic prints on copper plates. They resemble mini-circuits, like archaic memory media. Their charged materiality alters their legibility, but the attentive observer can identify photographs of open-cast mining operations in the reflections on the surface. Compared to these heliographs, Diluvian stories is a set of photo drawings of ruins reminiscent of the romantic iconography of a sunken civilization. Combining photographic prints on paper intended for engraving and lead pencil work, they are produced on sheets of amate paper, an ancient vegetable fibre paper of Mesoamerican origin used by the Mayans for their codices. For Daphné Le Sergent, the photo drawings, with their hybrid technique, are passages from reality to fiction.

Lastly, Defected Times reveals the story behind all these works. This graphic novel of 28 plates is structured as a palindrome. From left to right, it is the diary of an archaeologist discovering and reinterpreting the ruins of a vanished society, in particular history and the end of its memory devices. From right to left, it is the diary of an archivist responsible for preserving the memory of their civilisation. This society, which technically completely dematerialized its memory but which then recreated value from this immateriality, collapsed due to speculation on copper, the raw material necessary to manufacture devices for this memory.

While a fiction, this work plays with elements of our own society that we are familiar with, such as NFT files. Defected Times is a critical fable about the danger that the materiality of images poses to Western civilisation today.

Olivier Grasser

www.daphnelesergent.com