Interview by Clarissa Colangelo
Lola Pertsowsky
Lola Pertsowsky is a Master student in Photography at Luca School of Arts and presented her work “Failed Paradise” during the workshop on photography performing humour “Green, Yellow and Black” led by Lieven Segers.
Hi Lola, thank you for taking the time to do this interview.
Hello. No problem, it’s great to be here.
Could you tell us something about yourself?
I’m a French student currently enrolled in the Master of Photography at Luca School of Arts. I used to study in Bordeaux, in the Fine Arts School. Not only photography, but also mixed media such as drawings and videos. As an Erasmus student I came to Brussels and studied for a year photography and book edition. It was then that I decided that I wanted to do my master in photography, to have a different perspective on the photography creation: while in my previous school photography was used among other practices, at Luca it is considered more than a medium, it’s a practice. I wanted to have both inputs.
You and your classmates have been working on the subject of humor – which resulted in the workshop “Green, Yellow and Black”. How did you approach this subject?
First, we had a reading seminar by Liesbeth Decan and Mieke Bleyen during which we tried to define what humor is based on the reading of some philosophical texts. The focus was on humor in art and on how it’s displayed in photography. We all had to bring two or three examples of artists that according to us were dealing with humor and it was interesting to see that all of us brought very different material and that often that material didn’t make us laugh. Some of it did of course, maybe because the humor was more obvious in those images, but in many other cases the humor was underneath the surface so we needed other references to understand it.
Did you manage to find a definition of humor?
Well, it wasn’t easy. We all agreed that humor is not always funny: sometimes it’s really violent, some others ironic… there can be many different kinds of humor. You can laugh at it, or you can “laugh without laughing” if you understand the trick of mind and the wittiness. Vernacular images can be funny for everybody because we have the same field of reference. But with art, well it’s not a field… even I don’t understand sometimes the humor in art because I don’t understand the references
And then you met the artist Lieven Segers?
Yes, and he presented to us his and other artists’ works that dealt with humor. He gave us this assignment for the workshop: go somewhere you’ve never been and do something you’ve always wanted to do. He didn’t say “Do something funny”.
So how was it related to humor?
The title of the exhibition was “Green, Yellow and Black”. It refers to an expression that means laughing even when you don’t feel like something is funny… just laugh. So this was the frame we had to work in, it didn’t have to be obviously humorous.
“Failed Paradise”
What did you do when you got the assignment?
I wasn’t sure about where to go exactly. The “Go somewhere” part of the assignment didn’t necessarily mean that we actually had to go somewhere physically, so I went back to my images. I found one that I took during a trip to New Zealand: it was taken in a forest and it was ruined by a big drop of water in it. When I was taking the picture back in the forest I was thinking about the artist Thomas Struth. His series of photographs is called “Paradise” and was taken in the Daintree forest in Australia with a technical camera, one of those very large cameras that produce highly detailed images. I’m a really big fan of his work. When I took my picture, I had this in mind, but I could only use a very simple camera, a compact one. I knew I couldn’t reach his quality, but I was still hoping to. So you see, my idea was absurd and this was my starting point for the workshop.
I had the idea of enlarging my image and presenting it just as Thomas Struth does to see what would happen with it. I printed it in kind of a bad way, on different A4 papers, just like you do when you don’t have a large printer; then I framed it and presented it as a finished work with the title “Failed Paradise”. It’s not funny if you don’t get the reference.
Who took care of the positioning of the artworks in the exhibition space?
It was mainly directed by Lieven Segers, but we gave our input as well. For example, we decided to arrange the works in such a way that the public had to bend, crouch or look up in order to see them. We liked the idea of being in weird and different positions. It was another way to play with the code of our exhibition.
What do you think of this experience now that it’s over?
It was very stimulating. We didn’t have much time to work on it: Lieven Segers gave us the assignment on Monday and by Friday we set up the exhibition. It was somewhat difficult and different than what we’re used to. If you think of it, nothing is really funny out of context and we didn’t want to do funny photographs. Nevertheless, everyone managed to fully complete their work. I found it most interesting because it made us reflect about our own practice and we realized that sometimes instead of thinking about what medium would best translate our idea, it’s better to focus on how to translate it, on the action itself.
photography performing humour 