Seba Kurtis knows all about exile. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1974 and during the deep financial crisis that rocked Argentina at the turn of the millennium, he sought refuge in Spain. He left first and was followed by his family later on. They lived as illegal immigrants for five years, Kurtis working with other exiles on building sites.
Seba Kurtis has a fascination for the South American magical realism literary tradition and first hoped to become a writer. However, he found his means of expression through photography and began mirroring his experience as a migrant in his work.
The exhibition at Quai1 in Vevey, Switzerland, the permanent space at the Images photography festival, concludes with what was the starting point for Seba Kurtis’s photographic journey. The only item left behind by the bailiffs at the family home in Argentina was a shoe box. A shoe box full of family photos and three Super8 films. That box made the trip to Spain with Kurtis’s mother but the images had been damaged by a flood in the house in Argentina, marking both the prints and the celluloid.
Kurtis took this damage as his inspiration, a metaphor of the ordeal of exile. With all the dangers, hazards, loss of identity and dehumanisation that forced migration involves.
Seba Kurtis has worked on the coasts of the Canary Islands where boats of African migrants arrive, capturing images with a 4 x 5 view camera. He then immersed the undeveloped film in the corrosive sea water so feared by the migrants crossing on their flimsy vessels. He has also been to Cherbourg in northern France where he produced portraits of refugees who were hidden in a tanker full of talcum, their faces hidden by fragments of the white mineral.
In another series inspired by the British border police’s heartbeat detector system, placed on trucks as they enter the UK, he takes very long-exposure shots of the migrants, the exposure long enough for them to disappear on the overexposed negatives. Then, using a scanner that mimics the border police’s device, he tries to reveal the human forms once again. Sometimes they come back, ghost-like, sometimes not. Like the flight towards allegedly better worlds, chance and misfortune set the rules here.
The scarred photos and the equally marked Super8 films form an intriguing narrative of loss, ordeal and injury. The corroded images are the complete opposite of the visually appealing scenes we see so often these days. They tell a modern-day story, from the frontline, a tale full of meaning that only a sincere, vital, informed approach can bring ,depicted in a disconcerting form, somewhere between departure and arrival, tossed by the waves of chance.
EXHIBITION
Thicker than water
Seba Kurtis
Until February 27th, 2016
Quai1
Place de la Gare 3
1800 Vevey
Switzerland
Tel : +41 21 922 48 54
