MEDS Spetses 2019 - Mnemosyne

                                       
Mnemosyne
MEDS Spetses 2019 

About this project:

MEDS Workshop, or “Meeting of Design Students”, is an international workshop that takes place each summer in a different country, focusing on a different theme based in the architecture and design world. Two hundred multi-disciplinary participants live and work together for two weeks whilst also learning with and from each other.

The workshop took place on the island of Spetses, Greece, in the summer of 2019. Mnemosyne was one of the fourteen projects that made up MEDS Spetses 2019.

In today's world, where everyone has a camera in their pockets and can post 10 selfies a second on 20 different social media platforms, the painstaking process of shooting film on 30yr old analogue cameras, developing that film and then using the negative to create a physical photograph seems truly insane. So why did 12 international design and architecture students from all over the world do this for 2 weeks?

They say a picture says a thousand words, we will let these pictures exhibited here speak for themselves but want to let you know that they were made entirely by hand, with what seems like ancient technology at this point and with an understanding of how light can be harnessed into a replicable form to create art with.

Nothing in the world can match the magic of seeing the light take shape on your first photograph in the darkroom. Luckily this feeling is making a comeback along with everything analogue in the world of photography. All of our lost films and failures learning this process were worth it in the end on our very special analogue journey. 

           
                                 
The Process:

Together the team of Mnemosyne converted a bathroom and a chemistry lab in a former boarding school on the Greek Island of Spetses into two fully functioning photography dark rooms. Over the course of two weeks we shot and developed 125 rolls of black and white film (10 per student) on whatever analogue cameras we could find. In total we were able to unearth 20 cameras of different models and ages, gathered together from all over the world. Some worked, some didn’t work so well but a lot of them left some little impressions of their unique character on the photographs that were taken. Then we scanned our negatives to create digital copies before using one of our analogue cameras as a DIY enlarger to enlarge these negatives and turn them into real photo prints. Large ones too, up to 40x50cm! In order to transform the camera into an enlarger, we built our own rig out of cardboard, so that we could hold the negative in place, then use the Paper Exposer App by Jakub Kotrč (http://jakubkotrc.com/paper-exposer) on a phone to shine light through the negative and enlarge the image with the lens of the camera onto photo paper. After going through the paper development process, we hung our photographs up to dry in the Greek sun and then put on a fantastic exhibition, together with all the other MEDS Spetses projects, and invited the whole island to come to take a look.
                         
                                    
The Exhibition:

As part of the project, the participants curated and exhibited a large portion of their developed and enlarged photographs as well as artistic remixes of their work, both analogue and digital. This exhibition invited the local residents to view their island through a different lens, both in terms of the perspective of the photographers and the techniques used to capture the imagery. 
                                                   
                                           
Team Mnemosyne:

Tutors:
Jan von der Heyde, Vlad Georgiev.

Participants:
Lara Wschiansky, Pil Tesdorpf, Aulona Selmani, Vanesa Orana, Kristina Sargsyan, Venkata Jaidev Velicheti, Katarina Donovic, Sebastian Jungwirth, Alkmini Damianakou, Johannes Lamparski, Sebastian Schaaf, Tessa Krämer.

We'd like to thank the organizers of MEDS Spetses 2019 and all of the MEDS family.
http://medsworkshop.com

                               
MEDS Spetses 2019 - Mnemosyne
Published:

MEDS Spetses 2019 - Mnemosyne

Published: