Where the book is really born was in the quiet, uncanny connections between images that captured \u201cthe ruin and feeling of uncertainty\u201d growing up in the \u201cthird world\u201d they grew up in, which they found to be genetically made up of abandoned places, fragile objects, industrial leftovers, traces of ecological collapse and moments where nature and human structures collided. In Uncertainties, the collision of imagery creates a menacing tone throughout: where one photo shows a hand holding a delicate crystal, the accompanying photo shows a smashed windshield. Where one side of the spread shows a dilapidated bathroom sink, the next shows an inverted photograph of assault rifles lined up against the wall. Yihan and Jos\u00e9 allow the viewer to create the narrative, however uncertain and open-ended it may be.<\/p>\n
The duo were drawn to subjects that feel fragile, overlooked or unresolved, inspired by the \u201cvertiginous nature of realising that they lived in the margins of the wider world\u201d. The photographs have a textural interplay that is fascinating \u2013 in one diptych, a television shows fuzzy static and next to it, an image shows an almost cosmic, glittering downpour of rain. It recontextualises rain as a type of natural static that happens in the air. But both images capture the inbetween of places, the inbetween of channels and the inbetween of ground and cloud.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese images aren\u2019t about China or Chile as national identities. They\u2019re about what it feels like to grow up in places where everything is shifting faster than you can process,\u201d says Jos\u00e9. \u201cWe both come from regions marked by transformation \u2014 political, ecological, economic \u2014 and those tremors seep naturally into the work.\u201d In a geographical sense, one can see tremors as a type of almost-trauma, a vibration that could\u2019ve been something much worse, like an earthquake or a flood. That same tension carries through into Uncertainties, the uncertainty of what could have been, what could happen. This ambient violence manifests into photos of dog\u2019s jaws, a blaze, a rock striking water, a crushed bug, a dead bird \u2013 natural occurrences that hold savage possibilities.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Yihan\u2019s images, you see the residues of China\u2019s accelerated transformation in the form of precarious infrastructure and threats to wildlife,\u201d says Jos\u00e9. \u201cMeanwhile In Jos\u00e9\u2019s images, you see the scars of extractive economies in Chile in the leftovers of big machinery and industrial leftovers,\u201d says Yihan. \u201cThese parallels weren\u2019t intentional but we found that the traces of the accelerated industrialization of the 20th century were present everywhere we looked in our past.\u201d Accepting decay as a natural process, perhaps even a beautiful process, the book\u2019s main theme is encapsulated in a photo of two dead bunnies, one white, one black, holding each other in an eternal stillness. But together, they become a yin-yang symbol, an acceptance of life and death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Where the book is really born was in the quiet, uncanny connections between images that captured \u201cthe ruin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-222594","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}