4 / 30 Seeing what is there

Probably you did not notice, but you have been sitting on something precious today. At least, if you were at the Festung, and if you took a seat on one of the chairs. Tiancheng Cao has made them the protagonists of a photo series. He calls it ‘Found Art’.

“For me photography is not a channel to a real world, but an escape to get away from it. I always want to get away from everything. I want to get away from China to get here and I want to get away from the academic routine to this summer school. But it is not about escaping from the real. In the process of getting away something happens.”

“So, I try to create situations in which my pace doesn’t always overlap with other people's pace. I am creating this gap, so I can maybe hide myself in there. It is something really personal. I just gravitate towards discrepancy, to be not synchronized with the rest of the world.” 

I meet Tiancheng Cao and Abraham Oghobase in the studio of Jayce Salluom’s photography class. The day at the academy is coming to an end and only a few students are still around. Despite the long day Abraham and Tiancheng are in deep discussion. Tiancheng shows a series of photos of fire extinguishers that he took at the 65. Biennale in Venice. He tells us that he was exhausted by all the art after some time. To calm down he took pictures of 65 extinguishers. As the pavilions are run by different countries, their fire extinguishers apparently are country-specific. Growing up in China Tiancheng now studies humanities in the Netherlands. He has worked as an English teacher in Beijing for several years to finance his studies in Europe.

Abraham is working on series of self-portraits. He is fascinated by the religious statues in Salzburg and wants to re-create their postures to turn them into self-portraits.

“The figures are everywhere and they give you this feeling of a powerful past. A past that is more powerful than the present. When I take these postures, they become something else. Look at me, my skin is black and all the identity I carry has a different kind of history. I want to bring them into a different present.”

This is an older self-portrait of Abraham from a series called Ecstatic. His photography is often auto-biographic and concerned with his life in Nigeria and his journeys to Europe. He lives and works in Lagos and when I met him for the first time, he told me that it annoys him when people ask, if he would like to live in Europe or in America.  “I would never exchange my life in Lagos for one Europe. I am not rich, I live a decent live, but I want you to know that normal people live in Lagos.”

After our conversation I look at the statues on my way back home. I feel the more dramatic the gestures of the statues here, the more reduced the gestures of their passer-by.