Noises from the Silent Land

My father was a biology teacher. When I was a child, in Girona, he sometimes took me to his laboratory at the school, let me look through the microscopes and allowed me to feed the snakes and lizards of the terrarium. This founded my strong fascination with biology and the origins of life. When, as an adult, I moved to Sweden, a land of forests and lakes, I came in closer contact with nature and found a new way of existing in it. An awareness of the challenges of our environment started growing in me.

When I was invited to do a glitch photography artist project inside the 100-year-old dioramas of the Biological Museum in Stockholm, I didn’t hesitate. My endeavours became the image series Noises from the Silent Land.

The diorama of the Biological Museum is a 360 degree display of the Scandinavian nature, populated by stuffed animals. Dead, nowadays dusty and grey animals, that have been sacrificed in order to tell a story of the Scandinavian landscape and its wildlife. A story meant to awaken love for nature, but to the price of killing some of its inhabitants. It’s a condensation of the anthropocentric world view, where the animals are ours to kill and keep, but also our responsibility to preserve. It’s a realistic, yet completely unreal, image of an idealised environment.

My glitched images show the animals and the landscape of the diorama. But the scenery is broken. The wolf has three eyes - or is it five? The line of the horizon is ragged. The images are broken - defective. Just like the landscape they depict. At a first glance it looks real, but if you stop for a closer look you start distinguishing the details. The surface of the background painting is cracking, the elk’s fur is getting rather thin. And time has frozen.

I have worked for a while with pressing my photographic tools to a point where they can no longer take “correct” images. The Catalan artist Joan Fontcuberta points out that a photography is like a window. You look out and see the scenery outside, but don’t pay any attention to the window glass. It is only if the window gets a crack that we start looking at the glass itself. My photos are like that broken glass. They direct your attention to the layers that are otherwise invisible - the layers that consist of the photographer himself, the camera, the image as an object, the glass.

In this time of “alternative facts” it is becoming increasingly important to see clearly and be aware of what we are actually looking at. The distorting power of photography is based in its invisibility. It gives the impression of just happening and that the outcome represents reality - maybe even that it is reality. You press a button and reality comes out. There is no middle layer. But as a photographer I realise that the image has nothing to do with reality. The camera, the software, the printing, the framing, the location where it is displayed, the medium of display, the context in which it is used, the cropping, the photoshopping. These processes are invisible to most people and this is where manipulation happens. This seemingly natural process is the most unnatural thing. And the layers affect the content of the image. A “reality” that has nothing to do with reality. A virtual reality.

The Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson showed a whole world how life is created by his wonderful photos of unborn babies. Or, in reality, dead fetuses. He had to depict death in order to talk about life. A paradox, a sort of a lie that emphasizes the truth.

The diorama of the Biological Museum is also a lie in itself ‒ its goal being to represent the entire flora and fauna of Scandinavia ‒ a vast region of shifting climate zones. You would never see all these animals up close, you would never spot them together, and the landscape is a construction of “the Scandinavian Landscape”, a result of wishful thinking, an idealisation according to the standards of the Nationalistic era of the turn of the century 1900. This is what the founders wanted their nation to look like.

My aim is to open the eyes of the spectators, so that they start discerning the otherwise invisible layers between their eyes and the object they think they are looking at, in order to awaken a critical outlook on the things taken for granted. We are dependent on photography for awareness of environmental problems. I have never seen the rainforests in real life, yet I am aware of them being threatened, and I care about it ‒ thanks to photography.

Photography is a lie that can be used to talk about the truth.

Serinyà, Stockholm 2017

On Serinyà’s Noises from the Silent Land by Vendela Grundell

Three eyes stare intently towards something – or someone – just beside me. Three is one too many. Yet all of them belong to the same bird of prey, standing poised in an undefined forest on sharply clawed feet – and the feet are also multiplied. A freak of nature – or, a freak of the technology aimed to capture it? Serinyà’s photographs from the dioramas at the Biological Museum point out how nature and technology overlap – first in the hands of the taxidermist, then the curator, and now the photographer. He captures the overlap by capturing the moment when the image of the overlap breaks apart. The break is forced by moving too fast while photographing with the panorama application of a mobile phone camera. Poorly stitched, the transition between individual images is punctuated with gaps and delays – signs of a glitch.

Glitches disrupt the normal functions of machinery such as a computer – inherent within the system, yet uncontrollable like mutations disrupting the development of a species or the order of a biotope. As if the bird really had grown a third eye, the image hints at a world where time and space compress into a liberating warp – inviting the viewer to imagine new forms of life.

The error causing the image to look so supposedly unnatural does to the digital processes of the camera what anomalies do to the processes of natural environments. These two systemic structures share a history beyond metaphor – the first technical bug was an insect stuck inside a machine. Close enough to integrate into a material – the physical body of an animal, or of a camera – the glitch comes close enough to act precariously within and upon that material. For this reason, friction is a better word than error to describe what happens: depending on the context, the accident is a happy one. Serinyà’s random act of mistreating an everyday device follows an unexpected leap of nature that eventually ensures the survival skills of species.

In these images, the moment of friction – the break – can be found in the details. The subtle yet drastic interference of a vertical line disfiguring a creature by dividing the visual field; the pixelation dotting a usually smooth floor of artificial woodlands; the misplacing of shade and brightness in painted fabrics and sharp sidelights that give contradictory references to weather and hour of the day. These disruptions mirror the unattainable yet forever attractive vision of the museum display: to represent a sustained victorious fate through inevitable failure, to perform a seamless life-world through disparate theatrics and ultimate death.

Once you see a glitch, you see it in places far away from its technical origins. Paying attention to all kinds of cracks uncovers the lived experience and narrative of the thing being cracked. At the Biological Museum, the ecological spirit of the Scandinavian comes into focus – with a twist of today’s Anthropocene anxieties. At the same time, Serinyà’s mutations of the photographic process – somewhat handicapped images, as he puts it – raise questions about the state of photography as a medium while drawing the viewer into their hypnotic dreamscapes.

Another bird appears in a photograph whose glitches yield ragged edges and speed lines that mimic the implied motion of spread wings ready to take flight. Bringing a dynamic to what is clearly stuck – stuffed, glued, sewn, stacked – in the diorama, the sudden threat of a bird of prey is transposed to the sudden noise of a glitch disrupting the silent order of the system: the environment created in nature, in the photograph, or in the museum. The glass eyes keep watching us – a gleam of pulse in a dead creature, still with its intrinsic code to kick-start into life again. It is an inherent threat to the system that the system cannot afford to vanquish.