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."
