Text by Sara Poli
All Images © Daan Paans
Daan Paans (b. 1985, NL) is a visual artist and researcher working with photography, film, sculpture and text. A key theme in his work includes the desire to gain an understanding, in the broadest sense, of the transhistorical variability of image-making and how historical narratives can be linked to the current zeitgeist. His work has been shown extensively in the Netherlands and abroad, in places such as at FOAM Amsterdam, Munchner Stadtmuseum, CODA Apeldoorn, Red Hook labs New York and Bienne Festival of Photography Switzerland.
It is interesting to note that, in contemporary photography, the more pervasive the medium becomes—spanning newspapers, social networks, and the entire visual ecosystem—the more many artists and photographers who truly seek to understand it feel the need to decentralize themselves with respect to the medium. The practice of photography is being questioned at its very foundations, dismantled and recomposed in new forms: projects that are articulated through images, of course, but in which the images themselves seem to emerge from lateral, sometimes indecipherable paths, with origins that remain deliberately suspended or difficult to trace. This distancing from the camera is not an escape, but rather a way of approaching one of the crucial questions facing photography and its most current research today: what do images become when the media slips them away from the camera and drag them into a relentless flow of migrations and metamorphoses?
Daan Paans explores this plurality in his latest book, Floating Signifiers. Case Studies on Image, Origin, and Representation, published by The Eriskay Connection. The volume takes the form of a large, widespread “case study,” in which each section becomes a critical laboratory for questioning the deepest and most changeable layers of the image. The structure consists of nine chapters, which function as visual novellas: each one opens up an autonomous world, rich in suggestions, references, and universes of reference. The book opens with Heraclitus’ principle of Panta Rhei — everything flows — which becomes the key to interpreting the entire work. Paans uses this as a premise to explore how images traverse time, media, and imaginaries, transforming themselves at every step. Each chapter is constructed as an independent visual and conceptual ecosystem: an atlas of time that intertwines archaeology, art history, ecology, myth, pop culture, and science fiction to show how images migrate, hybridize, and change their function over centuries and across visual languages. This deliberately fragmented structure allows the reader to observe not only the final images, but also their intermediate states: reconstructions, copies, replicas, errors, speculations, models, visual hypotheses. Floating Signifiers thus becomes a compendium of metamorphosis, a place where the image is never a point of arrival, but a continuous process of transformation. From this perspective, Paans’ work also dialogues ideally with the theoretical reflections of W.J.T. Mitchell: his idea of images as cultural agents, capable of living, migrating, and regenerating over time, finds a practical and visual correspondence here. Paans’ images seem to take on this dispersive vitality, crossing copies, archetypes, simulacra, and new forms of representation.
If we examine the “Rhinoceros” section, divided into three distinct chapters in the book, it becomes clear how Paans uses these case studies to investigate the speculative and metamorphic nature of images. The starting point (Le monde avant la création de l’homme – Rhinoceros 1) is the famous rhinoceros engraved by Dürer in 1515: a representation constructed without direct experience yet destined to become, for centuries, the ‘authentic’ image for this animal, showing how visual plausibility can overcome the truth of facts. The discourse continues (Auroch – Rhinoceros 2) with the aurochs—a species extinct since 1627—and with the paintings of Lascaux, which Paans relates to contemporary replicas of the cave and animals “reconstructed” through genetic programs. In this intertwining, the original and the copy continually exchange roles: what survives is not the original animal, but its cultural image, stratified and constantly reinvented. The third chapter (Meteoroid – Rhinoceros 3) examines the origin of life and the narrative of meteorites. Paans combines ancient cosmologies, modern science, and science fiction, transforming meteorite props into 3D models. Once again, the image is born in a hybrid space, where reality and fiction feed off each other. What unites these three chapters is not only the theme of error, copying, or reconstruction, but the awareness that every image is always born within a field of forces where knowledge, imagination, and culture overlap. In Rhinoceros, Paans seems to suggest that visual history does not proceed by certain origins, but by successive stratifications: there are no ‘pure’ images, only forms that are transformed because they are continuously reinterpreted, desired, imitated, and projected. Images do not merely represent: they take the place of things, absorb their existential force, and then reproduce themselves autonomously. What Paans investigates, ultimately, is a sort of natural selection of images: it is not the most faithful ones that survive, but the most contagious ones, those capable of adapting and migrating to new media.
With Floating Signifiers. Case Studies on Image, Origin and Representation, we understand that the image is never a point of arrival, but a process. And recognizing this process means understanding that contemporary photography—especially when it “slips away” from the camera and questions what remains—finds its strength not in adherence to reality, but in showing us how reality itself is always a shared construction, a visual narrative in the making.
