Vestigium II
Christy Thompson
Throughout her artistic production, Eshrat Erfanian has examined sites and locations as a space for memory, reconnaissance and projection. These areas operate as holding places, conjuring up aspects of the past that are both personal and distanced. In her recent works, specifically the Vestigium series, the sites and locations are demarcated through a coupling of image and text. Placed either below or beside the image, the text often indicates information such as date, time or location. Through this positioning a relationship is created as the text acts as a corresponding description or clarification of the image. The word Vestigium is derived from the Latin and refers to the mark or trace left from something that has vanished or been lost. In Vestigium II, similar to the miniature paintings of Vestigium I, Erfanian assumes the role of an archivist as she links images of locations to addresses, and in this current case, of industrial sites. Combing through a history of locations considered once as home and now as sites of industry and manufacturing, Erfanian provokes a definition of time and place. More often than not, however, this definition is tentative, as the depicted imagery of locations is abandoned and vacant. And it is this sense of what once was that best explains the idea of a Vestigium. As a whole, the Vestigium series functions as an archive of place and time. But this archive is essentially false. The juxtaposition of image and text is certainly apparent throughout the work but it carefully relinquishes any sense of linear description or clarification. Rather what surfaces is the possibility of another space, likening the archive to a catalyst in which the identification of place is expanded.
Similar to Michel Foucault's idea of the heterotopia, Vestigium's space is neither easily defined nor travelled to. The heterotopia for Foucault suggests an interstitial space—somewhere in-between utopia and dystopia—but a place shifted from a conventional binary relationship that allows for a third position. It is also an area where there is dislocation or opposition that creates flux. Vestigium II is a selection of digital video stills of industrial sites in Toronto's west-end. Identified by real and fictional addresses of sites throughout Asia and the Middle East, these works propose a conundrum similar to Foucault's
heterotopia. Although initially understood as descriptions of the depicted sites, the text soon separates from the image. What results from this detour is the formation of an in-between space suggestive of a meeting ground of both stability and instability. This area of contemplation is best illustrated in writer, Jorge Luis Borges's description of the Chinese encyclopaedia as noted in Foucault's preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. The Chinese encyclopaedia provides a taxonomy of various animals, from the fantastical to the real. However it is not the differences between the animals that are in contention. Rather, the encyclopaedia characterizes itself as a heterotopia as it challenges notions of the Same and the Other by constructing yet another order, one of an intermediary site. This site, which lists all animals inclusively, is a site on which differences can exist in close proximity and it is a site without a space. Presenting locations without precise addresses, Vestigium II asks the viewer instead to construct one from the depicted evidences of industry, trade and manufacturing. From images of cargo ships in the Toronto harbour, freight trains that surreptitiously run behind the industrial buildings along Dupont Street and vacant warehouses that scatter the west-end, one is reminded of international trade and a gradual shift of manufacturing from North America to Asia. Vestigium II dually opens the viewer's eye to those urban surroundings that seem inconsequential or unimportant, provoking a re-evaluation of the city landscape. But beyond these initial observations one can be directed into a new terrain and to a larger reading. Erfanian's interstitial space that is consistent throughout her practice is both time-based and buoyant. Accordingly, the space that results from the intersection of text and image is indirect and entirely dependent on a viewer's own experience. Particular to Vestigium II is the use of technology and specifically that of the video-still as image. The paused image from a moving video reinforces the ebb and flow of the work's intermediary space and while it brings forth a sense of immediacy it is nonetheless ephemeral, lasting for only a moment. The series' prosaic imagery and unrelated addresses are indicators of what once was while simultaneously inquiring into to what is. This specific experience is a space for memory, reconnaissance and projection; in short, a third space that is not specific to a certain video still but entirely dependent on the juxtaposition between text and image. Moreover, it is the possibility of such a space that is significant and likens Vestigium II to a heterotopia.
The temporal archive of Vestigium II is similar but truly unlike any traditional form of catalogue or database. By the creation of a space where one does not immediately exist, the series challenges initial presuppositions that one may have. This indication of underlying shifts that happen without our recognition is a small but powerful action that invariably points out the banality of an urban landscape. More significant though is the overriding conflation between time and place. From the façade established by fictional locations, the viewer is brought to a site not as visibly concrete as initially perceived but ultimately more lucid in one's mind. Without any sense of nostalgia, Vestigium II's traces provoke a surfacing of memory, an experience that lays in wait throughout Erfanian's work.
Christy Thompson
Throughout her artistic production, Eshrat Erfanian has examined sites and locations as a space for memory, reconnaissance and projection. These areas operate as holding places, conjuring up aspects of the past that are both personal and distanced. In her recent works, specifically the Vestigium series, the sites and locations are demarcated through a coupling of image and text. Placed either below or beside the image, the text often indicates information such as date, time or location. Through this positioning a relationship is created as the text acts as a corresponding description or clarification of the image. The word Vestigium is derived from the Latin and refers to the mark or trace left from something that has vanished or been lost. In Vestigium II, similar to the miniature paintings of Vestigium I, Erfanian assumes the role of an archivist as she links images of locations to addresses, and in this current case, of industrial sites. Combing through a history of locations considered once as home and now as sites of industry and manufacturing, Erfanian provokes a definition of time and place. More often than not, however, this definition is tentative, as the depicted imagery of locations is abandoned and vacant. And it is this sense of what once was that best explains the idea of a Vestigium. As a whole, the Vestigium series functions as an archive of place and time. But this archive is essentially false. The juxtaposition of image and text is certainly apparent throughout the work but it carefully relinquishes any sense of linear description or clarification. Rather what surfaces is the possibility of another space, likening the archive to a catalyst in which the identification of place is expanded.
Similar to Michel Foucault's idea of the heterotopia, Vestigium's space is neither easily defined nor travelled to. The heterotopia for Foucault suggests an interstitial space—somewhere in-between utopia and dystopia—but a place shifted from a conventional binary relationship that allows for a third position. It is also an area where there is dislocation or opposition that creates flux. Vestigium II is a selection of digital video stills of industrial sites in Toronto's west-end. Identified by real and fictional addresses of sites throughout Asia and the Middle East, these works propose a conundrum similar to Foucault's
heterotopia. Although initially understood as descriptions of the depicted sites, the text soon separates from the image. What results from this detour is the formation of an in-between space suggestive of a meeting ground of both stability and instability. This area of contemplation is best illustrated in writer, Jorge Luis Borges's description of the Chinese encyclopaedia as noted in Foucault's preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. The Chinese encyclopaedia provides a taxonomy of various animals, from the fantastical to the real. However it is not the differences between the animals that are in contention. Rather, the encyclopaedia characterizes itself as a heterotopia as it challenges notions of the Same and the Other by constructing yet another order, one of an intermediary site. This site, which lists all animals inclusively, is a site on which differences can exist in close proximity and it is a site without a space. Presenting locations without precise addresses, Vestigium II asks the viewer instead to construct one from the depicted evidences of industry, trade and manufacturing. From images of cargo ships in the Toronto harbour, freight trains that surreptitiously run behind the industrial buildings along Dupont Street and vacant warehouses that scatter the west-end, one is reminded of international trade and a gradual shift of manufacturing from North America to Asia. Vestigium II dually opens the viewer's eye to those urban surroundings that seem inconsequential or unimportant, provoking a re-evaluation of the city landscape. But beyond these initial observations one can be directed into a new terrain and to a larger reading. Erfanian's interstitial space that is consistent throughout her practice is both time-based and buoyant. Accordingly, the space that results from the intersection of text and image is indirect and entirely dependent on a viewer's own experience. Particular to Vestigium II is the use of technology and specifically that of the video-still as image. The paused image from a moving video reinforces the ebb and flow of the work's intermediary space and while it brings forth a sense of immediacy it is nonetheless ephemeral, lasting for only a moment. The series' prosaic imagery and unrelated addresses are indicators of what once was while simultaneously inquiring into to what is. This specific experience is a space for memory, reconnaissance and projection; in short, a third space that is not specific to a certain video still but entirely dependent on the juxtaposition between text and image. Moreover, it is the possibility of such a space that is significant and likens Vestigium II to a heterotopia.
The temporal archive of Vestigium II is similar but truly unlike any traditional form of catalogue or database. By the creation of a space where one does not immediately exist, the series challenges initial presuppositions that one may have. This indication of underlying shifts that happen without our recognition is a small but powerful action that invariably points out the banality of an urban landscape. More significant though is the overriding conflation between time and place. From the façade established by fictional locations, the viewer is brought to a site not as visibly concrete as initially perceived but ultimately more lucid in one's mind. Without any sense of nostalgia, Vestigium II's traces provoke a surfacing of memory, an experience that lays in wait throughout Erfanian's work.