Green Polyphonies (2016)

Green polyphonies reflects on the convergence of cosmic time, technological time, and embodied subjective time. Polyphony is widely known as a musical term referring to a texture in which two or more independent melodic lines are played or sung simultaneously. Metaphorically, polyphony evokes multiplicity without collapse and layered presence, or describes a multiplicity of independent voices within a narrative. I’ve been thinking about polyphony through the mediums of light, movement, photography, and film, and their inscription on the image plane. This inquiry began with a contemplation of the relations between linear and cyclical time, and how these temporalities relate to the body. I started noticing how sunlight formed shifting shapes on the wall of my studio each day—a subtle, consistent indication of the Earth’s movement, visible through the sun’s changing position. I began recording these moving sunlight forms. At the same time, I was also exploring photographic interventions—particularly how light and movement, when captured through long exposure, could transform the body into a ghostly, abstracted image. At a certain point, these two practices intersected. I started experimenting with recording bodily movement during the specific hours when the sunlight was reflected and moving across the studio wall.

The result was a series of still digital photographic images that captured a polyphony of light and matter—sunlight, body, and camera entangled in layered time.

Sunlight entering through the window traces cosmic time—regular, planetary, and cyclical. Photographic long exposure inscribes technological time—stretched, synthetic, and mechanical. Meanwhile, the moving body has its own subjective time—affective, and nonlinear. Simultaneously, these registers create a polyphonic rhythm, a form of recorded temporal multiplicity.

These overlapping opacities, the shifting light, the suspended blur—These photographic interventions register a polyphony of light, while each exposure captures the friction and convergence of multiple temporalities: cosmological time, technological duration, and lived time. The result is a kind of choreography, where light becomes both instrument and voice. The green textile prop alludes to my thinking about the logic of digital chroma keying, where green functions as an invisible ground for other images to appear. Here, it allowed entangled temporalities to register and, as such, became a portal through which sunlight and camera light emerge. The photographic images were printed on film paper and illuminated from behind using custom-built recycled metal lightboxes. This material intervention transformed each image into a translucent plane that allows light to pass through, introducing another temporal and luminous register—lit from within.

Commissioned for CONTACT Photography Festival (2016), curated by Raquel Vilhena at Walnut Contemporary, Toronto.