Out of Context

Photographer:Joel Benguigui

Continent: Australia Oceania

Country: Australia

Project Title: Out of Context

Project Continent: Australia Oceania

Project Country: Australia

Nominated By: Franck Gazzola
Seconded By: Cynthia Boll

Out of Context pays homage to the ancient currents that carve the landscape I now call home. These waterways stretch back to my biological homeland in the eastern corners of the Indonesian archipelago. A series of geological maps shaped and carved by the constant movements of the ocean. Ancient yet re-written daily.

The series maps personal dislocation, relocation and relationships to time and space. Through my relationship to the volcanic islands of my birthplace, the snow covered French and Swiss alps of my upbringing, the graphic web of Paris and the coastal tides I now raise my own family beside on Bundjalung Country.

These maps are everything and nothing. The space, and the in-between. They are thoughts, ancestral songlines and rhythms. Motives and emotions. Witness to the passing of time. They are an invitation to reflect on our personal and collective relationship to land, memory, lineage and displacement. Through the absence of scale and interplay of details, these landscapes tap into the viewers imagination allowing their own narrative to emerge.

My fine art work has been influenced by the Japanese concept or MA, generally translated to mean negative space. MA can be the silence, the void, the pause.

I capture the land the same way I capture portraits: diving deep into the personal narrative of my subject, into the emotional load of a place. Created through slow durational processes of observation and listening. Shot on film and process by hand.