Trigger, Waalsekaai 47, Antwerp (2024)

26/06/2024

…To convey something without words is an art form akin to the silent movies I adored as a child. My approach to photography serves as an escape from the noise in my head and a medium through which I can express my endless fantasies and the deep-rooted, often unspoken stories that pass through my mind daily. It is also a way of bearing witness to my internal world, capturing and preserving fleeting moments of thought and emotion.
Despite the vibrant, explosive, and curious nature of my thoughts, my work remains calm, romantic, and layered—a contrast that has always frustrated me. Yet, this duality is an intrinsic part of who I am.
I am a paradox: an uncontrolled control freak, a dyslexic person who struggles to write without mistakes but is also a perfectionist. Despite these challenges, I embrace them, much like I do my lack of technical expertise in photography. Sometimes, this makes me feel like an imposter, as if my work is never entirely truthful or substantiated due to its flawed process. However, it is precisely these imperfections that drive me to continually “rescript” my work, striving to make it as truthful as possible…

Trigger has commissioned three photographers to reflect on the role of the “witness” in their work. You can read the general introduction to this series here in our profile.

Our third and last witness/photographer is Oona Bovri, a Belgian photographer who was raised in Antwerp and studied Photography in Ghent. She likes to tell stories through her photographs.She brings her characters to life by approaching them in the most analog way possible. When not working in analog, she uses materials such as lace, silk, paper, which she stretches in front of her lens to create a certain natural texture.

Oona’s creative process involves constant rewriting, rethinking, and recapturing—transforming her chaotic life and turbulent thoughts into images that appear controlled and calm, mirroring her outward demeanor.

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Selection:

26/06/2024

‘Today I stopped watching. Something in me has been irrevocably broken, and I want to sit with that brokenness, not as a martyr, but as a witness.’ ()

There is no photo that will be enough to put a stop to the genocidal violence in Gaza. In our latest online article, Benfquih questions the spectators‘ watching on the gruesome images of the unspeakable violence. What does it mean to watch - and what should it mean?

For implications of ’bearing witness’, the author reverts to the writings of Ariella Azoulay () and Sarah Aziza ().

We invite you to read Benfuiqh‘s essay through the link in the bio, and think with us about these questions in this tumultuous era.

This essay was originally published in Dutch in rekto:verso () edition 102: neutral, and is co-published online.

For Trigger, it was translated by Jonathan Beaton (.w.beaton).

Image: Charlotte Stuby, Passport Photo, rekto:verso, edition 102: neutral.
©charlottestuby

16/06/2024

…What is an image of a human if not a proof of affection. Over the past five years looking for excuses to make portraits has been a constant in my creative process. “I like your face, let me see if i can write you a role in the theater of my body of work”. It is so close to how I define romantic love too. “Look at me looking at you looking at me”. I’ve been giving it some thought recently and have now concluded that I am absolutely in love with people in the most romantic way possible, I am obsessed, and it is now my days’ work. And one who has ever been obsessively in love in the past will agree with me that the only way to maintain such sophisticated affection is to keep a reasonable distance between the lovers. It is not a dialogue where each one takes turns in looking, but an excuse to remain obsolete in being the object and the subject, all at once. Such is romantic love, the way I see it anyways, it is obsolete and all-absorbing. Being the lover does not simply imply existence of a subject of love, but it underlines the act of loving as such. Gazing is a necessary ingredient of romance and is an obvious one in photography, however, it is often overlooked. Of course, recently there have been many examples of artists using methods of creation that imply the opposite - starting off with the medium and then moving on to the concept, that is why I want to underline that I am only referring to portrait photography, which is the only photography I do, really…

Trigger has commissioned three photographers to reflect on the role of the “witness” in their work.

Our second witness/photographer is Liia Kosolovska, coming from Odesa, Ukraine. After acquiring academic background in first painting and then architecture, she choose to move to Brussels, Belgium to study the medium of photography as a supporting element of her literary art practice. She is mostly working around the topics of human experience, exclusion versus inclusion, alienation and ultimately becoming of age. She exclusively works with analog black and white portrait photography which serves as an illustration of human experience research.

Text by:
Design by:

10/05/2024

Are the white walls in galleries attracting you more than artworks or simply disturbing you?

We might wonder why these works are there and why we are there with them – all together in a ‘white cube’. Our lives are in a frame of location-changing from cubes to cubes, from homes to offices, to supermarkets, to hospitals…

It won’t be a surprise that we feel bothered when some beings come into our sight and intend to break our frames. In Daniel Zduniuk’s () article ‘The Silver Cube’, he describes the tension between humans and the disgusted insect ‘the silverfish’ which is notorious in art galleries for the destruction of both works and their storage.

Is the tension simply coming from the silverfish, i.e. the decomposition of our works, themselves or, maybe more fundamentally, from the challenge of our idea of the seemingly perfect, steady, and perpetual frame of white cubes that contain all of us?

Daniel Zduniuk’s article ‘The Silver Cube’ is now available on Tigger online. We are happy to invite you to have a look and leave comments below!

This spring, The Master of photography & Society of the Royal Academy of Art (MAPS, ), The Hague, and Trigger collaborate on a series of contributions on ‘unframing’ in photography. Master students critically reflect on how their practices attest to dimensions of unframing. Curator and mentor of the MAPS’ exhibition lab, Nuria Bofarull (), now being our guest-editor, wrote an introducing query about the topic online.

Zduniuk’s contribution is the fourth chapter in this series. (Quick link: https://fomu.be/trigger/articles/the-silver-cube )

Online design by Anxin Li, in collaboration with Ipek Aytekin.
@0.55555t

02/05/2024

This spring, The Master of Photography & Society of the Royal Academy of Art (MAPS, ), The Hague, and Trigger collaborate on a series of contributions on ‘unframing’ in photography. Master students critically reflect on how their practices attest to dimensions of unframing. Curator and mentor of the MAPS’ exhibition lab, Nuria Bofarull ( ), now being our guest-editor, wrote an introducing query about the topic online.

The third chapter in this series we launch is by Joseph Kennel

How do we utilise and reinscribe the ever-present past, in the now?

Photography sometimes shapes and controls space, narrowing our vision to see only certain events, bodies, stories, and projections of imagined time.

Joseph Kennel, in contrast, re-frames photography by following the lifecycles of materials, which become access points to other times, reaching back further than its own historical period. In his ‘Sensing Time and Space Through Stones’ space is, following Doreen Massey’s lead, dynamic and ever changing. As the slate (in North-Wales) becomes a connection point between the peak and the quarry, Kenell encourages us to imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far.

You can read and view his ‘Sensing Time and Space Through Stones’ on Trigger online.

Online design by Ipek Aytekin,

05/04/2024

This spring, The Master of Photography & Society of the Royal Academy of Art (MAPS, ), The Hague, and Trigger collaborate on a series of contributions on ‘unframing’ in photography. Master students critically reflect on how their practices attest to dimensions of unframing. Curator and mentor of the MAPS’ exhibition lab, Nuria Bofarull (), now being our guest-editor, wrote an introducing query about the topic online.

The second chapter in this series we launch is by Alina Lupu

When being caught up in a street protest, documentation becomes a messy affair. And unless you are a professional press photographer, there’s hardly a way, or even the intention, to ‘frame’ what really happens – a swirl of obstruction, passion, emotion, violence, surveillance is in the mix. In her contribution, Lupu is reliving her involvement as a protestor for Extinction Rebellion and attempts - in a kind of explosive after-report, reflecting on the difficulties of how to file a complaint against police violence – at indexing layers and understanding the dynamics of image-making during a protest for climate justice. The reader, and looker-on, travels along with the images from all directions. While she hold to account, Lupu is also questioning the instrumental role of images, whether as illustrations of a protest, as legal evidence or as witnesses for a community.

You can read his contribution on Trigger online.

Online design by Ipek Berfin Aytekin,

13/03/2024

Artists:
You can buy Trigger via the Fomu webshop online.

13/03/2024

Through this issue you’ll get another understanding of waste, the darkroom, and photography itself. It is photography itself that shows us possible routes, beyond the human, to spiritual energies that can help us repair and heal and ultimately centre (photography on) non-extractive values (and techniques). Trigger #5: Energy of thirteen contributions (essays, artist contributions, conservations) which engender possible ways photography might start to unlearn entrenched ideas and habits concerning the use and abuse of energy. Partner Organisation: Graphic Designer and Publisher: .gremmen .books Artists: Euridice Zaituna Kala, Sebastian Koudijzer Eline Benjaminsen, The Guest-Editors .gelezova designed by

22/12/2023

Does all artmaking involve psychic risk?

In a new Trigger online article, Brian Arnold () takes a close look at MACK’s () recent publication of Francesca Woodman’s ‘The Artist’s Books,’ meditating on the place of trauma and emotional crisis in her photographs. ‘With unflinching abandon,’ Arnold writes, ‘[Francesca] laid it out there for all of us to see, finding play and joy among her most broken pieces.’

You can read the full article ‘Artmaking and Psychic Risk’ via the link in bio.

Online design by Nienke Coers ().

Image 1 and 2: Francesca Woodman, The Artist’s Books (London: MACK, 2023).

22/11/2023

A hot topic today with automated algorithms feeding us political viewpoints on the daily, algorithmic biases and violence are nothing new, sees cultural researcher Yaa Addae (.dae).

In a new Trigger online article, Addae analyses Cameroonian artist and archivist Ethel-Ruth Tawe’s () new work ‘Double Exposures’. Made in collaboration with photo-historian Ben Krewinkel (), the work examines how representations of Africa as expressed through the popular medium of the photobook from the 1880s to the late 1900s formed a kind of ‘early algorithm’ to categorize and typecast people that mirror racist data today. Opting for a time-spiral, instead of a timeline, ‘Double Exposures’ allows us to trace how technology (then the camera, now artificial intelligence) has long been used to shortcut harm and how we might re-engage these tools with care.

Image 1: Double Exposures I, digital Collage © Ethel Tawe, Ben Krewinkel, 2023.
Image 2: Opacity, interactive display, 2023 © Ethel Tawe, Ben Krewinkel.

You can read the full article ‘Technology on Loop’ via the link in bio.

20/11/2023

Last week, Trigger #5: Energy, the new FUTURES edition 2023, was launched during the FUTURES meet-up days at FOMU in Antwerp.

A panel moderated by one of its authors Mariama Attah made sure the public got a thorough insight into some of the topics and debates that are being raised in this issue. Tanja Engelberts, Sebastián Koudijzer and Sheng Wen-Lo gave us wonderful perspectives on oil platforms, the concept of ‘energy’ as an antropocentric marker and spiritual or family-related matters to energy.

After, a group photo was taken by many others involved in the making process, including the guest-editors, some other artists and writers.

While ‘enduring’ the war energies and news of so much violence and oppressions happening in Gaza (not to name Congo, Ukraine, Sudan, …) we spoke through uneasy voices and dark tones about many issues and problems at the same time, related and unrelated to photography.

We’s like to thank you all again for all the good energies!

gelezova
.blaasse .viaene.31
And we thank all the other non-present writers and photographers for their work in this FUTURES edition of Trigger.

If you’d like to purchase Trigger #5 please check out the online shops of FOMU and Fw:books.

31/08/2023

What have you been reading this summer?

We invited fourteen writers, researchers, photographers and curators to share what is currently occupying their mind through one publication they have been (re)reading this summer. Highly personal entries to a diversity of publications (photobooks, studies, monographies, essays, surveys) lead us – readers of these readers – to reorient our gaze on (the history of) images and photography.

Read all about it through the link in bio.

And if you got inspired, let us know what your favorite summer read was.

Thanks to our summer readers: .hidde .att.johnston
Trigger editors and .viaene.31 added theirs as well.

Online design by Zhenzhen Luo and Nienke Coers.

Image credits:
Alice Wong, Man Unraveling (TBW Books, 2022)
Flaneur Magazine, Issue 09: Boulevard Périphérique
A History of Photography in Indonesia: From the Colonial Era to the Digital Age, edited by Brian C. Arnold (Amsterdam University Press, 2022)
Luigi Ghirri, Puglia. Tra albe e tramonti (Mack Books, 2022)
Nasser Road - Political Posters in Uganda, edited by Kristof Titeca (The Eriskay Connection, 2023)

04/07/2023

What does it mean to connect through photography?

To Brussels photographer Vincen Beeckman () it means to work closely with and within the communities surrounding him, to foster long-term relationships with his peers, and to never lose touch of the human side in his projects. The result: an oeuvre that fades temporal, disciplinary, and interpersonal borders, and that offers an intimate peek into lives that are hidden, hectic, and at times beautiful. In light of the recently opened exhibition ‘Ping Pong - Vincen Beeckman’ (on view at FOMU until October 8, 2023), FOMU curator Rein Deslé () reflects on eleven years of knowing and three years of working with Beeckman.

You can read the essay through the link in bio

Online design by Nienke Coers ().

All images © Vincen Beeckman

29/06/2023

Triggerfomu just arrived in Dublin to participate in PhotoIreland Festival 2023 (). Editor Tom Viaene (.viaene.31) will engage in their two days of Critical Practice Reviews, i.e. one-on-one meetings with photographers and curators. Thank you PhotoIreland () for this set-up.

This upcoming professional weekend is also the opening weekend of the festival with exhibitions guest-curated by Catherine E. McKinley () and Renée Mussai (). Check out all the wonderful artists they have assembled through the festival’s profile.

Our first stop today: the wonderfully packed and critical bookshop The Library Project () where we lost ourselves devouring critical photobooks such as Lewis Bush’ ‘Depravity’s Rainbow’ (), Rubén H. Bermudéz’ ‘And you, why are you Black?’ (), Lenard Smith’s ‘Melancholy Objects’ () and Atong Atem’s ‘Surat’ ().

Trigger #4: Together is apparently in good company with other magazines there - together for sure. (photo 1) While we were there, the work of Bermúdez was being installed in the bookshop. (Photo 2 and 3) As he’s also part of this festival.

‘Stay critical’ is the bookshop’s guideline. We tried to stay loyal to that by buying the spring issue of Jacobin and - of course - ‘Uneasy Listening. Notes on Hearing & Being Heard’ by Anouchka Grose & Robert Brewer Young. Because we are in for some uneasy listening starting tomorrow. (Photo 4)

26/05/2023

‘No one is going to tell you this as clearly as I am: images not only can manipulate, but they must. At least if they want to achieve what they’re aimed at.’

This is a statement by Daniel Mayrit (danielmayrit.com) who, in 2008, initiated an eponymous political movement in Spain with the motto ‘One of Yours’. Independent writer and curator of Impressions Gallery in Bradford () Raquel Villar-Pérez () interviewed this presidential candidate for Trigger about the ways he makes photography central to his political career.

You can read their conversation on politics, images of politics, and the politics of images through the link in bio.

For more on the aesthetic strategies of real populists, you can visit ‘One of Yours’ at The Photobook Museum () in Cologne until 18 August 2023.

This contribution was designed by Nienke Coers () for Trigger online.

17/02/2023

Have you also noticed that there’s a certain ‘renaissance’ of the working-class narratives in the – in the US specifically – film industry?

In our new online publication the young American critic Taylor Dorrell () – who has become a kind of household name to Trigger magazine over the years – marks a ‘Third American Renaissance in culture’, seeing parallels with the ‘proletarian culture’ of the 1930s.

Dorrell’s swirling essay links Mark Fisher and Mike Gold, going against Slavoj Zizek and Georg Lukacs, while delivering a fresh perspective on films such as Nomadland (Chloé Zhao) and mainly Sorry to Bother (Boots Riley). There’s an interesting nod to the photographic work by Ruby Frazier LaToya as well.

This is film criticism, backed up with a load of Marxist history. Dorrell’s challenge is to find a way out of ‘capitalist realism’:

‘While this proletarian moment should be celebrated, with culture and politics seeming to sync up in time, this parallel movement appears out of step ideologically. We are constantly bombarded with the line that there is no real movement past neoliberalism, only the reintegration of resistance back into capitalism.’

As the essay unwinds, he believes that the way politics and culture are in sync these days, makes certain cracks in the system become more and more visible.

Trigger has commissioned the young illustrator Kristian Stupak () relate to that ‘visual trap/crack’ that reverberates through Dorrell’s essay.

You can read the long read through link in bio.

Online design: Niki Xiaolan Tang (.xiaolantang)

10/02/2023

For many, the lockdown provided a terrifying glimpse into a world where social connections are tightly regulated and rapidly falling apart. This made it all the more urgent for individuals to reconnect with their emotions, feelings, and bodily sensations and to contemplate the prospect for collective introspection and community connections. Independent artist-researcher Stéphanie Verin () has responded to this realization by developing a growing interest in the field of somatic practices, which involves exploring the awareness of the body in motion using a combination of interdisciplinary techniques, methods, and procedures.

For Trigger's latest online publication, we have invited Stéphanie Verin to delve into the realm of somatic experience. Drawing on her background as a herbalist and self-taught naturopath, she focused on the practices of Brussels-based dancers including Francesca Saraullo (), Betzabel Falfan (), Meytal Blanaru (), Céline Van Der Haegen and photographer Mira Matthew (). Through examining how sensitive dance can connect participants to their sensations and foster a movement that is in tune with their state of being, she opens up the possibility of somatic practices serving as a valuable resource for public health and as a gateway to a heightened environmental consciousness, both sensorial and political in nature.

Finally, she discussed the potential of photography as a means of exploring the process of awareness and documenting the effects of somatic practices. Together, the somatic landscape and the photographic archive of dynamic bodies hold the promise of encouraging individuals to become ever more mindful of their bodies and feelings, leading to a genuine connection with the world.

You can read the long read through the link in bio.

Online design by Niki Xiaolan Tang (.xiaolantang)

10/02/2023

For many, the lockdown provided a terrifying glimpse into a world where social connections are tightly regulated and rapidly falling apart. This made it all the more urgent for individuals to reconnect with their emotions, feelings, and bodily sensations and to contemplate the prospect for collective introspection and community connections. Independent artist-researcher Stéphanie Verin () has responded to this realization by developing a growing interest in the field of somatic practices, which involves exploring the awareness of the body in motion using a combination of interdisciplinary techniques, methods, and procedures.

For Trigger's latest online publication, we have invited Stéphanie Verin to delve into the realm of somatic experience. Drawing on her background as a herbalist and self-taught naturopath, she focuses on the practices of Brussels-based dancers including Francesca Saraullo (), Betzabel Falfan (), Meytal Blanaru (), Céline Van Der Haegen and photographer Mira Matthew (). Through examining how sensitive dance can connect participants to their sensations and foster a movement that is in tune with their state of being, she opens up the possibility of somatic practices serving as a valuable resource for public health and as a gateway to a heightened environmental consciousness, both sensorial and political in nature.

Finally, she discussed the potential of photography as a means of exploring the process of awareness and documenting the effects of somatic practices. Together, the somatic landscape and the photographic archive of dynamic bodies hold the promise of encouraging individuals to become ever more mindful of their bodies and feelings, leading to a genuine connection with the world.

You can read the long read through the link in bio.

Online design by Niki Xiaolan Tang (.xiaolantang)

03/02/2023

The idea that art can transform the world, has been around, of course. But how does an artistic practice become a social practice which has transformation at its core?

Trigger’s newest online publication is a long read about the intricate, transformative healing practice of the British-Kenyan Grace Ndiritu (). Ndiritu sets up close collaborations with art institutions and its staff in order to instigate a conversation on the future organization or collection.

She will have a mid-career survey at SMAK, Ghent (), from April 1 till September 10. On February 16, her collection show at FOMU () entitled Grace Ndiritu: Reimagining the FOMU Collection will open and will run until 2024. FOMU invited Ndiritu to enter into a dialogue with its collection, starting from her own artwork A Quest For Meaning. Each year, FOMU asks an artist to become a guest curator, and create an exhibition by diving into the collection. They can make new connections using on their own art and associations. Ndiritu’s intervention leads to a radical and holistic re-interpretation of ‘your’ classical collection exhibition.

Enter, art critic and writer Hettie Judah (). Trigger had commissioned her in 2022 to write an essay to accompany the latter exhibition. If Ndiritu is making us see and feel the role of transformation through art (mediation), Judah is delivering us a new understanding of how Ndiritu’s Gesamtkunstwerk ‘A Quest For Meaning’ thrives on an ‘ongoing’ longing for alternative communities. Judah especially makes clear how Ndiritu’s new photographic universe of painting, textiles, and interior design shakes (up) the common view on how art could relate to activism, the spiritual, life and artefacts – if one would want to keep these categories separate. Ndiritu’s ‘map through time and space’, according to the author, is an exercise in ‘non-hierarchical museology’, with no predetermined destination.

You can read the longread through the link in bio.

Online design by Niki Xiaolan Tang (.xiaolantang)

02/02/2023

Trigger #4: Together is out!

Designed by Hans Gremmen (.gremmen), Fw:Books (.books). Guest-edited by the American photographer Susan Meiselas (), who helped design and compile it.

Trigger #4: Together explores various forms of collaboration in photography. Sixteen contributions engage with strategies of co-creation that stretch notions of authorship and ownership, breaking through existing heteronormative, state-owned, or hyper-individual categories. Essays by Elspeth Brown, Ileana Selejan ( ) and Hettie Judah () respectively zoom in on the ‘cross-dressing’ archives of Casa Susana, the multitude of protest movements and the healing of cultural spaces. Forms and conflicts of human and more-than-human forms of togetherness are explored through the work of Jonathas de Andrade (), Grace Ndiritu (), Leigh Ledare (), Dries Segers (), Meghann Riepenhoff () and Vincen Beeckman (). Rabiaâ Benlahbib and Taylor Dorrell () each interviewed photographers and curators, working in the broader field of socially engaged practices. Nato Thompson () would have ‘curator’ changed in ‘infrastructure builder’. Both Rita Ouédraogo () and Mariama Attah () on their part, see a crucial role for the curator as caregiver in making sure the focus is on ‘togethering’ as a process. Last but not least, Debmalya Roy Choudhuri (), Susanne Kriemann (.kriemann), Tuan Andrew Nguyen (.andrew.nguyen), Kaali Collective (), Rehab Eldalil (), Hoda Afshar () and Anthony Luvera (), have repurposed existing work for ‘together(ness)’.

You can get your copy through FOMU’s online shop.

Let’s get ‘Together’!

27/01/2023

Trigger is excited to share that the American photographer Susan Meiselas () has guest-edited our newly printed edition Trigger #4: Together, which will be available from February 6 onwards.

It was a pleasure and privilege to work with Susan. A themed edition on different collaborative practices in photography which is both close to her own longstanding practice and resonates somehow with what she has been working on lately too – a long-term project culminating in a book on ‘a potential history of photography explored through the lens of collaboration’, together with Wendy Ewald, Ariella Azoulay, Laura Wexler, and Leigh Raiford (forthcoming 2023).

Susan Meiselas brings with her a tradition of documentary photography in which she explores ways of revisioning the relationship between the photographer, the photographed, and the viewer/the audience. She headed our temporary editorial board, which believes this is a time when a critical, historical, intersectional approach to ideas about collaboration and relationality in contemporary photography is much needed. That’s how we got to work on a themed issue on notions and imaginations of ‘making together’ and ‘togetherness’; and on how ways of making together engender forms of togetherness in photography.

Susan Meiselas will be participating in the FOTODOK Book Talks on February 9 in TivoliVredenburg (Utrecht, the Netherlands) where Giya Makondo-Wills () and Rob Hornstra () will interview her on her work ‘Carnival Strippers’.

FOTODOK Book Talks is the platform for the stories behind photo books. In this live talk show, photographers, designers and publishers get interviewed. They share special stories about a variety of subjects with the audience. Check their profile here .nl for more information.

Trigger #4: Together will be available during that event through the Utrechtse Boekenbar

More insides and insights on the different aspects and contributions of Trigger #4: Together will be shared next week and the weeks to come.

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