I first noticed the jellyfish at the city beach of Rovinj over a year ago. When I returned with my camera a few weeks later, they were gone. It wasn't until a year later that I saw them again—caught in a small bucket, brought into an improvised studio, and photographed in a cell-culture dish.
Back in the studio, I delved deeper into learning about these creatures. I discovered they are called sea walnut and belong to the genus Mnemiopsis, a type of comb jelly. They are characterized by the fact that they lack the characteristic nettle hairs, which prevents them from injuring humans.
I also learned that they have only been present in the Adriatic Sea since 2016. Lacking natural predators and reproducing rapidly, they spread quickly in their new habitats and are therefore widely feared.
However, Luise, a warty comb jelly researcher in @mariegamillscheg ’s novel "Aufruhr der Meerestiere", resists the term invasive. Invasive implies an intrusion, an attack. Since the creatures arrived in the Adriatic via the ballast water of empty cargo ships from the American Atlantic coast, it wasn’t the animals who invaded—it was humans who transported them.
In that sense, they are an image of the globalized world order.
Limited edition of 20 copies
Pigment print on Hahnemühle FineArt Pearl 285g
20x26cm, signed
framed 33.4×27.4 cm, oiled limewood, museum glass UV70
Today some throwbacks of the class “Contact and Scale” by Pascal Petignat ( @pascal.petignat ) and Helena Kalleitner ( @helena_kalleitner ) (Teaching Assistant) which took place 5–17 August 2024 at the Fortress Hohensalzburg, Salzburg.
The course combined different photographic techniques, ranging from the use of large format cameras (8 x 10 inches) to simple photograms. The focus was on the perspective of the scale, the angle of view and the transfer of the subject within a new space. Here displacement and scale play important roles, allowing artists to transfer their analysis of reality into a different space (darkroom or presentation room) – and thus into a different reality. When thinking about the composition, to decide on closeness and distance, the photographer or image-maker already sets initial accents. The situation in which photographs are taken and developed have an influence, both spatial and performative, on the artistic process. What is the relation between a photograph taken with a large-format camera and a photogram? How do plane surfaces and three-dimensionality meet, and what happens in between?
If you spot yourself or your friends in the photos, let us know in the comments so that we can tag you!
Photo credits: Mira Turba ( @mira.turba )
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#summeracademyAT #courses2024 #academylife #spaces #group #perspective #photography #reality #international
Remains of the photographed mushrooms. Traces of forest particles that got into the studio.
"Kritter Mappe"; 20x26cm, pigment print on Fine Art Baryta Satin
So this is the first machine in the Kritter collection. I photographed it two years ago in a valley in East Tyrol.
Technical intervention in nature should no longer be read and accepted or rejected exclusively as an economic factor. Rather, the machine is part of a complex system of relationships or, according to Haraway, "assemblages of organic and abiotic actors that make history, evolutionary and otherwise".
from "Kritter Mappe"; 20x26cm, pigment print on Fine Art Baryta Satin
Trauermücke II
The "imagines" of the fungus gnat live the short five days to reproduce. But since the females lay about two hundred eggs, they quickly become quite many in the studio. No great flight artists but very happy in front of and on the screen. In my studio there are no predators. The yellow glue traps have replaced this deficiency and created another imago.
From: "Kritter Mappe"; 20x26cm, pigment print on fine art exhibition matte
In winter I took a houseplant from the street and with it, without knowing it, a population of fungus gnat larvae. Soon the larvae have become small dark insects that have spread throughout my studio.
"Imagines" is what scientists call the adults - the image of the species. The animals live about five days to reproduce and lay up to two hundred eggs per female in the moist soil. The animals mostly died in the area around the windows. There I picked them up and in my curiosity added another imago to the animals.
"Trauermücke" from "Kritter Mappe"; 20x26cm, pigment print on Fine Art Baryta Satin
