silence | Vanna Karamaounas

Silence

This series of photographs by Vanna Karamaounas was taken during the artist’s stay in Iran. With shots of bricked-up openings, interiors, and construction sites left untouched, the artist continues her exploration of human traces in the architectural spaces they construct and their presence in absence.

It presents images of one or perhaps several buildings appearing abandoned, with interior and possibly exterior views at times, blurring the lines between the interior and exterior spaces, and between interiority and exteriority.

The theme of obstruction is almost omnipresent in this series. During her comings and goings in these houses with their opulent past, Iseult Labote focuses her lens on doors and windows blocked by bricks, on moucharabié bays made blind by mortar or even on broken walls that reveal the very framework of the palaces beyond their thin walls. Like a search for light or a hope of finding the exit from a labyrinth, even if it means trying to cross all the walls that stand before us, whether they are made of stones or thoughts, material or immaterial.

In these now-deserted palatial rooms, the only light Iseult Labote’s photographs allow us to imagine are the zenithal oculi, like large, ever-open and inaccessible eyes, pierced into the tops of the domes. They reveal no clues other than the infinite sky, cutting off the world. And yet, by letting daylight in, they perhaps unwittingly allow all kinds of reveries.

The other architectural elements detailed by the artist, most of them mute and blind, possess an evocative and suggestive power through the very meaning they carry within them. Devoted in their primary function to the circulation of light and beings, they have been blocked, becoming the instigators of darkness. They remain forbidden, unable to fulfill their role. And in turn, they forbid, preventing any connection with the outside world. The horizon is blocked. The applied cement makes opaque what should allow the light to enter, and cancels out any perspective.

Construction sites are places where access is usually forbidden. These places are potentially perilous. Yet they are also places where forms are born, move, and are created, although here the outside world seems to be prevented from penetrating the very heart of the construction site, the palace, the psyche.

With these dead-end streets, prohibiting all passage, Vanna Karamaounas’s photographs present a repertoire of openings that have become screens, testifying to a space where it is neither permitted to see nor to know, but which, through the artist’s observation, become poetry, material for reflection, hope, and understanding through this visual recurrence of the walled-in enclosure, a symbol of the forbidden.