Oddments

Oddments is an involuntary photographic project. It reflects on the leftovers of discourse, on the surplus of the processes that take place in the darkroom, on what is forgotten, as though it were a notebook of hasty visual notes. It talks about the way in which photographic cuttings (test strips that are usually not given more importance than simply being part of the process) contain spontaneous decisions that reveal a subconscious participation, an underlying intention. The project begins with by Gael del Río and Luca Bani’s realization that all of the images contain condensed, involuntary stories which at first, they were totally unaware of.
The secrets of each scene are gradually revealed with each gesture that manipulates the image. In front of the enlarger, they make test strips from a negative: this involves reframing. They make notes on these test strips: this gives them new meaning. They keep them without giving them an explicit purpose: this leads to an inaudible dialog. At that point, they escape their hands and their intentions. Time plays its part.
One day the plastic bag has aged. Inside, the images have taken on a different meaning, through accumulation, coexistence, combination: they reveal a disturbing sense of unity between them even though they were created by two different people, in different places, moments, and projects. Oddments is born, strictly speaking, when they are recovered, exhumed, and called upon to construct their history from fragments, to create, from something apparently dysfunctional (like a puzzle with differently sized pieces), something akin to the creation of a new body from the members of different subjects. Architectures, bodies, objects, and landscapes no longer stand alone, they are slippery and no longer participate in their original purpose: the change in scale has homologated them, twinned them. A crease becomes a joint, a chest a dune, skin an abyss, a curve a meander. Everything prosaic becomes sublime... and vice versa: the inaccessible points of a snowy peak become a rock crowned with guano.
These test papers were born incomplete, asymmetrical like odd numbers; but at some point, they became complete through their encounter with others, different, foreign: their pairs. This has a correlation with human beings: Oddments is the result of the conjunction of two people, two gazes that seem to complement each other until they become indistinguishable. Oddments are remnants, scraps, and cast-offs transformed into something superior. The impedimenta that accompany Gael del Río and Luca Bani when they decide to save a few pieces of paper from their fate in the garbage and turn them into a reflection on their activity as photographers. A surrender to what happens beyond their reach. The possibility of a question: what discourse emerges from the remains of discourse? 
 
Text by Carlos Martín included in the book.