Meanwhile in Brussels — Interview with Dries Segers

What is your relationship to the medium photography?

I have an intense relationship with photography. There are days I just love its history, current identity and its future. Most of the days I find it a challenge to find my connection to it, this is also its quality. Photography has so many varieties, in my practice I render different aspects of the medium. The medium is stretched into zones it wasn’t foreseen to end up. You can look at it in a positive way and think it gives a lot of power to the medium or you can say that it is jaded. Photography started as a slow medium but it’s becoming the most rejected medium which we immediately swipe away after we have consumed it. Because of the lack or the amounts of identities, I feel I can push it into unknown zones. My photographic practice is intertwined with strategies used in drawing and painting. Nevertheless, it always becomes a photograph.

What role does publishing play in your practice and in particular in your work Seeing a rainbow (through a window that isn’t there) and FUNGI ?

The camera, material, (print-)technique, size and installation have always been important in my practice. I only start to realize what I’m working with if I touch, interact and feel the physical photographic image. Publishing and editing is one of those actions. Seeing a rainbow and FUNGI have been book projects from the beginning on.

Publishing is also a space where I and my work can interact with words. I never chose to have a theoretical text accompanying my publications, in Seeing a rainbow there are seven e-mail conversations published on the theme of beauty. With FUNGI, Hannah De Meyer wrote a text/story starting from my images. It blends in perfectly with the design of Ine Meganck & Chloé D’hauwe and references another book by the same author.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on a project called The Natural Contract. Here I focus on mark trees (Grenzbäume). These are planted species in the landscape according to agreements between countries, town halls, provinces, landlords, … and mark an individual or communal boundary or change. In recent time the tree has become part of the landscape and lost its code and symbolic value. A tree becomes a dot on a map, a reference. With a changing environment and shifting landscape, these trees move from being cultural-historical bearers to non-information in a panorama. They fade again into the invisibility.

To get a closer view inside Dries Segers’ work visit his website under www.driessegers.com

malenki.net features the following publications by Dries Segers