The project “Latence” (2019-2024) is a kind of autobiographical road movie, which views wandering as a psychological journey and a quest for artistic emancipation. On the Road 66 and through the landscapes of Louisiana in the United States, memories awaken at the edge of this photographic stream of consciousness. The images, now latent, situated at the border between dream and reality, past and present, adapt to the flow of the conscious and the unconscious: memories, desires and anxieties emerge and blend with reality in an almost enigmatic harmony. The forward movement reflects the desire to overcome inhibitions and wounds, to access one’s own artistic essence, this ‘rediscovered childhood at will’ (Baudelaire) and tame it. Excerpts from poems and songs of the Beat Generation, written by often invisibilized women such as Denise Levertov or Ruth Weiss, accompany this philosophical quest and search for self-liberation, as an act of artistic and feminist emancipation. The automatic writing and photography intersect to express this latent creative part of the human being that only asks to be expressed and brought to light.
Body flesh
Whose flesh
Has crossed my will?
Which night common or blest
Shapes now
To walk the earth?
Diane Di Prima, 1990
Here before the sunrise blue & the solitude
to you: come home. The moon is full over morning
buildings, the shade of solitude is upon my hand:
Come home. In this empty loft of high windows
the shades are lifting, and people are arrived:
To you: in the early silence between US that IS,
folded deep into night and black well of sources
in-here is gone forth to meet in there &
WE are bound below a sound or gesture;
beneath distance, before time, at the foot of the
silent forest, meet me here, I love you.
Jannine Pommy-Vega (1968)
