Text by Sara Poli
All Images © Martín Bollati
Martín Bollati (Buenos Aires, 1986) is a visual artist, editor, and teacher. He is the founder and director of SED editorial and 0/0. His work explores the relationship between photography and fiction, with a specific interest in the discursive capacities that exist on the margins of the photographic apparatus and its structure. He has published the following books: A Kind of Loop with Riot Books, La forma bruta with the University of Cádiz, Vacant Dream State with 280a, Para describir una flor with Raya Editorial, Ruinas sin título, Aguas vivas, Texto Nazi, and Hermes/Unesco with SED editorial.
By analyzing Martin Bollati’s work, we have tried to make the case for how cultural anthropology can expand through photography and its language. How are today’s systems of cultural classification or cataloging viewed by photographers or visual artists? Born between Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century, cultural anthropology is a neo-discipline created out of the need to learn about non-European cultures for, initially, colonial purposes: understanding and studying distant cultures up close was, for the colonists, a way to understand and subsequently control them.
Interestingly, photography was also born in those years, as the result of the incessant desire to represent reality. Contemporary photography offers interesting insights into the conception of human, anthropological culture. It is an interesting artist’s lens for recording all those institutionalized phenomena that appear clear and established to us, the result of study and scientific thought through centuries of field research, archaeological finds, meticulous cataloging, and, finally, the museum space where the work so carefully studied finds its regal final location in glass cases, usually accompanied by a small caption containing the descriptive text or name of the find. Photography and anthropology, in addition to their unison birth, are very often closely related in their approach of vision to the world, and to human culture. If the photographic medium is used in conjunction with anthropological thinking, an interesting combination of techno-culture is created: on the one hand, anthropology branches out questions about the actions, traditions, or behaviors of a given cultural phenomenon, while on the other hand, photography appears to us as the technological medium, recorder of these human questions. Suppose the anthropological method poses questions to examine them. In that case, photography is a figurative medium that can also return cultural issues to the viewer using methods that intersect between the subject and the photographic language itself.
Looking at Martin Bollati’s Hermes / UNESCO work, one is confronted with an extremely interesting receptacle: numbered from one to nine hundred and ninety-nine, here are present these totemic – sometimes unknown – objects that permeate books or museums of ancient art history: the Idols. Idols that Bollati finds in numerous vintage Unesco catalogs, found in thirty-five volumes aimed at grouping – for each book – relics and artifacts from ancient civilizations: the Greek, Egyptian, pre Columbian, Etruscan, etc. It is well known, by the great anthropologists, that in this part of the world called the West it often happens to collect objects, to group them: the cataloging carried out by the publishing series Unesco – Hermes Bosilibros De Arte published by UNESCO presents itself as certainly practical way of showing a given civilization or culture, but it inescapably creates a “label” cataloging that risks to homogenize too much a given subject or object.
In this contemporary anthropological reference work, Bollati reasons through the language of photography in correlation with a new medium: “Grouping these books, I wanted to create something with the new tool of artificial intelligence.” UNESCO’s entire photographic work was processed by the artist through artificial intelligence software: two or more images of theological artifacts processed a new image, creating another kind of idol that is certainly false, but believable. Looking at the images in the book, we may be able to recognize what may be macro-errors present in these new ancient artifacts, but they are imperceptible and leave the benefit of the doubt.
This work, in its book form, restores the visual dignity of these historical artifacts where, by dint of flipping through the pages, they create further ambiguity in the narrative. Artificial intelligence creates an additional layer of modification to these pre-existing images in UNESCO volumes: the impossible cataloging of the publishing series creates a new one, which is reborn in the form of other, but similar objects.
The question arises: how much past cataloging was there before UNESCO’s publishing series? Could all the art/historical information that has come down to us from antiquity have come from remote cataloging where the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, codified according to the means it had at its disposal? Hermes, as the title of the work suggests, is the messenger of the Gods in ancient Greece, and may come down to our millennium, bringing new depictions and interpretations of the Divine.
