THE PURE TRUTH ABOUT STRANGE PEOPLE, 2018, Series of 10 C-Print on Hahnemuhle paper, 90x60cm each.

The series is the result of a photographic bricolage of digitized miniatures taken from the thirteenth-century Dutch poet Jacob van Maerlant’s book Der naturen bloeme (The Flower of Nature). A sort of medieval Wikipedia, the manuscript provides a catalogue of exotic animals, plants, but most of all a description of a series of strange people, presumably living far away. This ancient book has become a mask. We see the miniatures and at the same time another world, enabled by the cuttings, the faces of the artists and the plasticine clay. With this series we play with the process by which one takes measurements and transform it, but also with how one continuously overturns the relationship between the observer and the observed object. The theme raised here is who is looking at whom, that is, the question of who can be defined as a foreigner. It discusses the idea of how a group can be formed through the presence of a stranger, and also how a fantasy account can shape the mechanisms of perceptions of reality.