THE NARRATEE
︎ sammakingbooks.com
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No time,
Last year Saskia and Amanda simultaneously found a box “in the attic”. Saskia encountered a box filled with postcards, letters, slides and pictures from her dad Jan who died in 2017. Amanda found a box filled with slides, logbooks and snapshots of unfamiliar faces from her dad Brian who died in 1994 when she was only 14 years old. Saskia had her father around for a long time, Amanda one the other hand for a short time. Still both knew so little about the time before they were born. What was he like? What did he do? We both remember fragments of stories and with all that material we started to make A story. THE story remains unknown.
The publication consists of two untold stories and thus two books that can be read simultaneously. The stories are very different yet sometimes look strangely the same.
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︎ photographer.ru (review)︎ Olga Bubich (review)
No time,
no place,
an untold story.
Last year Saskia and Amanda simultaneously found a box “in the attic”. Saskia encountered a box filled with postcards, letters, slides and pictures from her dad Jan who died in 2017. Amanda found a box filled with slides, logbooks and snapshots of unfamiliar faces from her dad Brian who died in 1994 when she was only 14 years old. Saskia had her father around for a long time, Amanda one the other hand for a short time. Still both knew so little about the time before they were born. What was he like? What did he do? We both remember fragments of stories and with all that material we started to make A story. THE story remains unknown.
The publication consists of two untold stories and thus two books that can be read simultaneously. The stories are very different yet sometimes look strangely the same.
︎ photographer.ru (review)︎ Olga Bubich (review)
year 2018
size 150 x 200 mm
pages 104
limited printrun 150
technique Fujifilm Jetpress
binding saddle stich
year 2018
size 150 x 200 mm
pages 104
limited printrun 150
technique Fujifilm Jetpress
binding saddle stich
size 150 x 200 mm
pages 104
limited printrun 150
technique Fujifilm Jetpress
binding saddle stich
Exhibitions and participations:
Polycopies Paris
Unseen Amsterdam
Photoparis
Offprint Paris
les Recontres d’Arles
Artissima Turin
Manifesta Palermo
Tate Modern Offprint London
Dutch design week 2016/2017/2018
Photo Festival Naarden
REVIEW
Olga Bubich
The Narratee
"Lives, decisions, choices that we (do not) make every day, every hour, every second, naively reflecting on our own uniqueness, indulging/succumbing to a false assurance of being able to exercise control. But all this: both option A and strategy B, both fundamentally and in detail, have already taken place. Somewhere, some time and more than once. This street, this lamp post, and this drugstore [1], now closed, because the whole area is to be demolished. As well as the stories of two fathers - unknown like distant celestial values, who left behind their daughters and their boxes with photographs - all deal with the same things. “... when you'd squint your eyes, the clouds could almost pass as mountains,” is Saskia’s father Jan's voice. “... when you'd squint your eyes, the clouds could almost pass as mountains,” Brain's, Amanda’s father, voice resonates"
"Mountains and waters symbolically stand for navigation coordinates, I conclude, meditating on two notebooks stitched into one photo book “The Narratee” - another project of Saskia Overzee and Amanda Butterworth's tandem. In fact, this is the story/ies of two close people, young men who (un)consciously remained in their daughters' memories with visual documentation of by no means fateful youth trips. Conceptually, of course, the point is not in this but, just like in the women's previous projects, in wide and incredibly rich context of the photographic medium.
Approached as a conversation,
as a prerequisite,
as starting points (and dashed lines),
as a graceful, attractive geometry of thought."