By Apostolis Artinos
During the quarantine imposed by Covid-19, Lizzie Calligas takes refuge in her safe haven in Spetses. She lives a slow and desirable life. She reads, goes on solitary walks with Coco and takes care of her garden where she picks flowers to decorate the house’s vases with. She then photographs them. In the darkness of this particular moment she searches for the minuscule light thattraces the reliefs of things; maybe she is also searching for a sliver of hope of a way out. This series of photographs where things, withstanding their weight, almost disappear in the minuteness of their existence, Calligas titles Dark. A darkened, deadly atmosphere traces a familiar environment. A slow, almost still time reveals itself in the riveting moment of its captivating seduction. These images are characterized by a tender uncanniness, a tame mourning, a Tarkovskian haze depositing its humidity.
There is a truth in these photographs, a truth also diagnosed by Vilém Flusser, who comes in this way, into dialogue with Calligas’s shadows. The gaze arrests the world not in an abundant lighting but in the distinctions of its darkness. It is precisely the darkness of the gaze that is able to distinguish things and to reveal their representations. The thing that is being represented is also the thing that has been been surrendered to its shadows, to the half-light of its truth but also to its oblivion. In this unique loss, in the event of its withdrawal, or its sublimation as Lacan would put it, the photograph makes the object come true. It is the night time as this was preserved in the act of romantic creation, this twilight of the world. What these images capture, what photography itself captures—if anything—is this distant echo that remains, the withdrawn trace of the world, or even better, the trace of the withdrawn, the trace of withdrawal itself.
In all different stages of its manifestation, Calligas’s work is made up of momentary flashes, bursts of light. Isn’t this also the truth of Photography itself? After all, the flower is also the moment of its flowering. Moments later it too disappears. An ephemeral life caught in the ephemeral light that delineates it. We find ourselves before what Bachelard terms a “momentary metaphysics”, a privileged, unique moment when one becomes conscious of the world.Α revelatory, and perhaps also apocalyptic moment when the subject finds itself wide open in the face of its suspension, in the moment of its death; before a vision of the world that is impossible but also radiant, in this gift that is its image, a gift that the victims of the pandemic were deprived of in their heavily guarded last rite. There is a sense of alertness in this moment; the photographer’s disquieting gaze never rests. The photographs in the series are images of a deafening silence, images that belong to a poetic moment. They encapsulate a hovering sentiment swiftly travelling its orbit and set to vanish soon after. What rescues this sentiment—or at least some part of it—is the click of the camera. This is why there is both something familiar and unfamiliar within the photographic image, because it captures the fleeting trace of our emotion, the memory of a deep, and now inaccessible, experience. The experience of the moment is not a moment of an experience but the entirety of the emotions it brought with it, which now also register onto this image, this mournful trace, itself a trace’s trace. This is the gift of the photographic image; this offering of a glimpse of time, smitten by its images, its revelatory, fairy-tale moments, the unique moments of its withdrawal. In this riveting moment, Calligas’s flowers, indicate in a way that I would call desperate, this impossibility of return, the impossibility of time longed for, its farewell, the farewell of a unique lucidity.
The period of the pandemic presents a temporality of such a quality. You abandon yourself in a deceptive time span and linger in an unaspiring wait. Unconsciously, you become part of the frequency spectrum of the times and reveal yourself in your nakedness, your existential bleakness. It is precisely such fragmented times, ebullitions of our most anguished moments that give rise to our images. The thing’s position, the event of its sublimation which is also the moment of its imprint and permanent inscription, is revealed within this abandonment, this weakness of the mind. This indentation is also our very damage, the traumatic condition of our Being. Seen in this way the images make up a nocturnal experience; but it is the experience of a night which tests us. The artist however is not blind anymore than Homer was; Rather, they are smitten by the abundant lighting of things, a lighting that momentarily disrupts their vision in order to grasp the thing through tracing it. The thing is always considered in relation to its loss, in its impossible experience, in the hopeless click of the camera.
In the half-light of her room, Calligas’s dark flowers uniquely prove and bear witness to something: this poetic retrieval of the gaze, the end of its worldhood, a different way of taking it in. It is in this inverse stimulation that the gaze traces the inexperience of things rather than their localization. The inexperience of the world is its darkened form, not its ascribed image but the rendition of this image. The revelatory power of the gaze is this sense of blindness that characterizes it, its invisibility, the darkness of its consideration, this state of things that are not properly seen but are only faintly visible as they await their image, their final, renunciatory form. As was the case with the swimmers of her dark waters, in these recent images, Lizzie Calligas intensifies her poetic gaze, lays it open to the darkness of the Real which surrounds her, abandons herself to its destiny and astonishingly, saves herself.
Translated from Greek by Irini Bachlitzanaki