PETER FISCHLI, GILI TAL

Often, I found myself taking the same photos in different cities: moving through streets, parks, airports, hotel corridors, restaurants, subways, and other tunnels. Taking pictures of manholes on the sidewalk, fragmented pedestrians passing by, or images of a pretzel, a cappuccino-heart, a half-full cocktail glass or a splintered cell phone screen, captured in a moment of micro-attention. Taking images from three or four angles using the camera app, creating files that automatically store themselves by date and location. Then, I apply one of the phone’s three built-in black & white filters, adjust the contrast, and crop until I like them. Sometimes, I saw myself as an artist acting like a tourist, and sometimes as a tourist acting like an artist—stumbling through the so-called public space, looking either up or down, taking photographs of dogs—mostly attached to their leashes- or ensembles of tall buildings with tall trees—and seeing these images immediately reappear in grids on my phone—my phone that, anyway, feels like it belongs to the public space.

Later, I would select my favourites and start giving these photos titles, wavering between observation and interpretation but also deriving pleasure from internalising the exterior, attributing language, and producing subjectivity. Mimicking the process of dream interpretation or simply naming the images to fix their existence, driven by the fear, or hope, that they mean nothing to me—that I’m touched, or alienated, from my observed surroundings, The Poodle-Cappuccino Matrix.

One could see these images as hybrids of stereotypes and archetypes—symbols and signs, full or empty, depending on our energy or mood to decode or interpret them. Look closely, they could have been taken anywhere? Back in the studio, I printed all images on photo paper, all square and in black and white, and created an interrupted pattern, repeating specific images so they would briefly appear as ornaments, providing a short moment of orientation. Later, I printed them on single vinyl tiles (80 x 80 cm), sometimes (70 x 70 cm). They get laid out on a floor of a gallery space, so viewers can walk them, as they might, too, stumble through a simulacrum of the city—partly resembling a questionable interior decoration—or as if they were walking on the image grid of my phone, filled with the same typology of images as other people’s photo album: food, dogs, cars, buildings, trees, babies, flowers. Only when the photo-floor comes into touch with the so-called real world—when it is trodden on by shoes and paws, wheeled over by strollers, and when cut-out autumn leaves come to cover it—it feels that work is done.