General Entry - Emerging Talent Awards

SOUVENIR Various bali #1 One morning, in front of a temple I didn’t go into, I bought a package of postcards from a little girl. On it was written Various Bali Postcards. The postcards are assembled in book form. You flick through the pages and glimpse majestic temples and volcanoes, rice-fields quilting the landscape with harmonious geometries, monkeys looking into the camera, ceremonies and obsessively symmetrical temple porches like doors opened onto another world, dancing girls with sumptuous garments, men draped in that black and white check fabric, kain poleng, which protects anything wearing it and symbolises the balance between good and evil, day and night, male and female, life and death... all those concepts we’re used to seeing as opposites, whose meeting generates life and movement, as anyone who contemplates those little squares for a while knows well: the more you look the more they dance and make our eyes dance. Eyes which afterwards, in search of kinds of beauty not included in the postcards, stop to dwell on a plant against a wall where grey proves yet again that it’s a colour, or on wooden splinters graphically modulated by time, or some other object of enchantment. Various Bali is also a book, talking about itself. It’s about how it was conceived, partly willed and partly by chance; about the choices that anyone constructing a book has to make every time they confront a blank page and start to fill it. It’s about the ways that images (their colours and shapes) can fit together. It’s about the little fragments our memories are made of, the pieces we assemble in order to compose an image that corresponds to our wishes or surprises us. About the quest for an image where we can rest. This book is part of Souvenir, a self-produced publishing collection.