Agnes Varda (b. 1928, Belgium – d. 2019, France)
The Gleaners and I, 2000

I appreciate how Varda is tracing her idiosyncratic associations to gleaning through various contexts, sites and people. While watching the movie I came to compare it to the contemporary “reality TV” shows. Where the latter have fixed formats and roles that the audience is conditioned to learn and expect to be repeated with some variations in faces from one episode to another, Varda allows herself to glide between very different roles and contexts relatable only through some associative pattern recognition on a higher abstraction level.

In my projects – especially the ones based on my daily iPhone photo “gleaning” – I am also organising my collections based on some idiosyncratic associating and pattern recognition. That may occasionally clash with my audience being too conditioned to recognise the format as “instagram” or “FB” – or to expect art only to re-tell the stories they’ve already subscribed to (“anti-consumerism”, “anti-capitalism”, “speaking for those who have no voice” etc.), rather than trying to make sense of what I am pointing at without too much of that prejudice. I am experimenting with different responses and attitudes towards that, it’s still very much work in progress.