Clavarino's Castle and the Essential Paranoia of The Grid

The Castle by Federico Clavarino is a smart book that is a visual overview of the state of play in contemporary Europe that is told with layers of inscrutability, double-dealing and paranoia added. It's about the heritage of the institutions and thought processes that rule the continent, and how that manifests itself both physically and psychologically.

The idea of Europe shapes and fuels the history of a considerable part of our planet, starting from ancient Greece and the Roman Empire on to the great colonial powers of the last few centuries. The aim of this series of photographs is to follow the traces these ideas have left upon the surface of things and people in post-WW2 Europe, as well as on the walls of its cities, in the galleries of the museums in which its history is conserved, and on the barriers that are raised to define and defend the borders of its territories



So as you go through the book, you'll see those references; to Greek thought, to Roman power, and then beyond to the Holocaust, to conflict, to division, to a state of exclusion and the creation of a place that, like Kafka's Castle, is impenetrable and impermeable. 

It's divided into chapters which, according to the statement, have the following meaning. 

The Castle is a building made with images and it consists of four parts. Its first chapter, “The Dead”, refers to its modern founding myth: the events that led to the contemporary European order. Chapter two, “The Organising Principles”, deals with the ideas of power and authority that are at the basis of European societies. Chapter three, “The Castle”, explores the resulting building by evidencing its elements of separation and control. Finally, the fourth and last chapter, “At Twilight”, is at the same time a prophecy and an exhortation.

I think that is over-complicating and distancing things and that the last chapter in particular is not as clear as it could be. Because for a book that is so heavily abstract and based on symbols and signs, The Castle is  a direct and transparent book. The thing that comes across most is the referencing of  Kafka's  novel, The Castle; the story of K., a man struggling to get permission from the Castle to authorise him to live and work in the village which the Castle has summoned him to survey. The Castle is all-seeing, all-knowing place that nobody from the village has ever been into. It's distant and it's imprenetrable, it's amorphous. Most of all it has a low-level malevolence, a low hum of suspicion to all those outside it that renders K. both paranoid and helpless, 

So we see borders, barriers and fences throughout the book. There is a sense of blockage that mirrors the defensive architecture both  of Europe's urban centres and its outlying edges. There are symbols of surveillance, of somebody, something seeing but not being seen, and this is compounded by the constant layering of images throughout the book. They hint of someone looking out but at the same time trapped.

Unfurled rolls of paper point to bureaucracy and suited figures at the bureaucrats who run it. There are crossed arms that constitute more blockages; there is no entry to the Castle here and if you didn't know it the grilles, the security, the earphones and the repeated images of the architecture of power and exclusion will say it again for you. The world of Clavarino's Castle is, like the Kafka version, an unwelcoming, paranoid place.

It is the recreation of that paranois that makes Clavarino's book so special. In that sense, The Castle follows on from Italia O Italia in using the essentially hostility of grid-based architecture (and mapping) to express fear and control. It layers its story through repeated connected symbolism. So it's a book of signs. But it's a very direct book of signs. It has something to say, and it says it very well. 

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Read Gabriela Cendoya's Review Here

Mount Hermon: Where the Watcher Class of Fallen Angels Came to Earth

A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see. I am subject to a double infirmity: I am hurt by everything I see, and I constantly reproach myself for not looking as much as I should. 

Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Tristes Tropiques"

From Carly Steinbrunn  and The Voyage of Discovery

How do you sequence pictures? How do you tell a story with them through the page, across the book, how do ideas and images link and combine and make new ideas and new stories. There are more than a few great publishers around doing this in very conscious and direct ways. It's not always easy, but it is seeking an answer to the question of how pictures work. That gets skipped over most of the time. Sometimes it's a bit obtuse, with a plethora of waves, rocks and earthsides giving contemporary photography a very elemental air. But for now, this obsession with visual and conceptual sequencing feels fresh when it's done well.  The late lamented Akina did it with Federico Clavarino's Italia O Italia and, in a more gothic fashion, with Grand Circle Diego. Dalpine books are doing it with books like Ama Lur. Fishbar Books are more accessible quietly raise the bar with every book they make; Olivia Arthur's Stranger being a particular favourite of mine for the way the images seep together through transparent paper, the fictional and the actual combining in arctitectural and geographical highlights.




And then there's Mack, They publish Alec Soth, Broomberg and Chanarin, Joan Fontcuberta and Paul Graham. They are the big names. But beneath that you find other, lesser known books that really push the boat out on how pictures are put together. Porque Las Naranjas, Another Language, Elementary Calculus, Cosmology all use photographs and the histories behind them in original and dynamic ways.



The Voyage of Discovery by Carly Steinbrunn fits right into that list too. But as well as looking at how colour, shape and category can be used to mould a story, Steinbrunn takes us on an archival journey where what we are seeing and how we see it is never quite clear. It's a journey into the image itself, built into a journey into the history of the planet on which we live.

The book starts with this quote.

 A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see. I am subject to a double infirmity: I am hurt by everything I see, and I constantly reproach myself for not looking as much as I should. 

Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Tristes Tropiques"

So things are not good from the start. There's an invitation to think about  a disappearing world and our failure to see it.

Failure to see what?

Well, we have to turn the pages to find out.

Once we're in, everything is quite enigmatic. There are cliffs followed by Mount Hermon (me neither), Australian Forest and Flints. The captions at the back tell us this.

It is all quite primeaval, a kind of documentation of the anthropocene era through pictures that appear to be a mix of the contemporary, the archival, the  found and the vernacular.

The energy of the earth is apparent in a sequence of waves, there are pictures of ancient texts to go with Mount Hermon. It looks religious - hold on, I'll Google it;  it's the place where the Watcher class of Fallen Angels came to earth and it's on the Israel Syrian border. Oh my God, that is like Buffy meets Armageddon with Realpolitic Characteristics so we're on the right track there.



It's the earth being born and our insignificance in the geological scheme of things. So we get the rocks, the earth, the sea, the clouds, all the elements, but it's an unnerving combination. Our pathetic attempts to shape this world are shown in images of Brasilia and a crash-landing Boeing. It's not good and as we get to the end of the book, the aridity and sense of mortality deepens. We're destroying ourselves, we're destroying the world. Or maybe that's just me.

But at the same time, perhaps we're not. In the grand scheme of things (and what is the Voyage of Discovery about, if not the grand scheme of things), we're just bit players. Cultures, peoples, languages and humanity itself may die out but the earth will live on.

In the midst of all this, there's anthropology, geology, zoology, and aeronautical engineering. There's a whole mass of photographies to sift and sort through, none of which leave one with an easy feeling. It doesn't end well needless to say. The last shows what happens to the crash-landing Boeing we saw earlier (they're probably not the same plane, but in Photobook terms they are). It crashes, explodes and burns. But in reverse. It's a test flight. But isn't everything.



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