Description

Many projects serve as licenses for adventurous travels and rambles through the most desolate of places in extreme circumstances. Michèle Matyn (b. 1978) uses her camera in a very intense and personal experience of the landscape, and in a fashion highly contrasting to the usual documentary approach of distance and objectivity.

Her sensitivity for nature is stimulated by a research in age-old folk tales en customs, anthropological myths and sagas, but also popular comics and films about the narrow, supposed boundaries between man and animal, between human and demon. These animistic thoughts, folktales, and charged places are triggers for Michèle Matyn’s travels. She uses traveling as an atelier. The way of dealing with her surroundings can be read as ‘participative observation’. It connects Matyn’s photography to her performances.

“To become a beast

To wander loose

To buy a leash

To seek a tamer

To get stuck on thoughts

To get caught

To go feral

To breed mistakes

To seek a tamer

To speak to no one

To seek a tamer

To withold no one

To seek a tamer

To leave no stone unturned

To seek a tamer

To ignore every opposition

For centuries the master

For centuries the beast”

From: ‘Arrows of Thought’ Saskia De Coster