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
Launched at Netwerk Aalst 17.01.2014
With the support of the province of East-Flanders and Base-Alpha Gallery
