Scrapbook

Photography and cinema don't merely reflect reality. They capture and transfigure. They expose and deceive. They lift veils or deliberately skew. Photography and cinema have a relationship with reality similar to our own psychic mechanisms. In this ceaseless interplay between representation and reality, they can sometimes take the place of individual defences, acting like a plaster cast on the gaze. This is what happens in Scrapbook, when, in the 60s, Hoolboom's friend Jeffrey Paull sets up a media workshop in a psychiatric hospital to help residents see themselves again. Forty years later, Donna's testimony - a resident from 1966 to 1978 - on the images captured at the time, reveals the almost alchemical potential of cinema.

The children's bodies in space, without borders, without barriers, not knowing who starts where, each one's limits, vases overflowing. Each face posed as an enigma, invaded, overwhelmed by emotions. Neither joy nor sadness; a tidal wave that crushes everything in its path, completing the dissolution. "What if my eyes refuse to recognize?" worries Donna, "What if this face that Jeffrey has given back to me, through his photographic gesture which has acknowledged me, what if it still eludes me?"

The act of photographing, filming, retaining, revealing, is here celebrated in its very essence; it's not Barthes' "it-was", but the "it-could-be"; all the possibilities of transmutation, transformation and metamorphosis contained within each person, and freeing them from the bonds of fatality.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk Artistic Director