Ensembles Assembled

Ensembles assembled: in full color. A project that highlights the visual report between social realism and euphoric utopianism referencing the visual and material facilitation of socially unifying rituals. Photographer Katrin Korfmann’s work is characterised by the bird’s-eye view perspective from which people are photographed moving in the scene below, capturing them in static images that present an abstract of human interaction: strongly aesthetic, its dynamic bound by the grid of everyday life. Rather than showing a sum of independent persons moving, Korfmann’s new work records people merging into one being. In various places on earth collective rituals are photographed: events sustained by individual euphoria in which colour – or colourful garment – dissolves individuality. The highly aesthetic project reports of social realism and euphoric utopianism, acting in between the global event catalysing a visual surrender and the glocal play catalysing deeper contextual literacy. The full series had its première at Onomatopee. Pictures of the human towers ‘Castells’ in Catalunya (Spain) for example, or the ‘Cascamorras’ festival (Spain) in which black paint plays a prominent role, or also the ‘Els Enfarinats’ in Ibi (Spain), a militaristic looking fight with flower, eggs and fire extinguishers that takes place on Fools Day. Another new work came about on Korea during the ‘15th Mud Festival’ that sees teens and tweens throw healing dirt at each other and rubbing it in, thus allowing for physical contact of an intimacy Asians would otherwise consider inappropriate.