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How do we orient without naming, how do we hold space without subjugating, how do we become “we”, be present without othering, colonizing, or being colonized? How do we find presence in absence, and how can we decentralize power and build resistance in image making and dissemination?
The Shadow Archive is a repository for images of the in-between. Visitors are invited to upload images of shadows – theirs or otherwise – and to write a short description, with the explicit request to not include any personally identifying information (faces, names, locations, etc). An embodiment of Lacan’s objet petit a, the shadow is a trickster: it is simultaneous presence and absence, the self within the other and otherness within the self, uncomfortably floating in the triadic relation of body — object — architecture. Power is relational, subjectivity is spatial, narration dictates orientation, and public space, be it in the physical or digital sense, is not neutral or equitable.
The project was developed by Katie Zazenski for the exhibition Immerse!, The Shadow Archive is an evolving, liminal, inconspicuous monument to visibility, orientation, and translation, inspired by the community surrounding Tallinn Art Hall’s Lasnamäe Pavilion (EE).