Ilit Azoulay | Shifting Degrees of Certainty

My name is Ilit Azoulay, and I'm participating in the exhibition Ocean of Images, with the work named Shifting Degrees of Certainty. Shifting Degrees of Certainty is an image of a map or a brain at the same time, containing 85 puzzle pieces and for each puzzle it's an image that has a background story a historical background, I would say that is served to the viewer via an audio guide device. Can you talk to me about the methodology that you used or the process that you used during that piece? Yes, when I arrived to Germany, I started to spot the places that haven't been bombed during the Second World War, because I wanted to reach the process or the understanding of how certain public spaces are being preserved. After coming from Israel and tracing the law of conservation and preservation in Israel, I was very interested to see how it's taking place in Germany. I started to photograph objects, architectural relics, certain images, all connected to architecture, and the only main umbrella that I knew at that point is that everything that I'm photographing is either under conservation, preservation, or restoration status. And then I started a process of understanding, asking questions regarding the historical background of each image that I photographed. And those questions took me to a road that surprised me very much and creates the system and the way that the work shifts itself. And it was usually correspondence with the archives or certain experts concerning the object or the image that I photographed. So the piece is made of 85 images, but there are also sounds and recordings that you did during your residency. My question is was it conceived to be right that way from the start? Yeah. Usually when I start a project, there a very few basic rules that I know from the beginning but I have to have a big bubble of unknowing and to open my ears to what's appeared and revealed from the process. And it's opened in a way for me a possibility of a staring, leaving your eyes on an image that is not necessarily very interesting, but while listening to a journey, imagining a three-dimensional aspect of other images that could be there in a way. So you started working with the analog process at the beginning of your career, and then you switched to digital. How has that affected your work, and do you sometimes feel nostalgic about the old analog process? Yes, I think for me, it's all mixed with a personal development. When I take myself back then, I felt I would say that in the world of communication, and I feel that a camera is a communication tool but also in other aspects, all kinds of communication, there's so little precise thing. There is so little moments of real meetings. So when I found myself with my first camera that I got from my grandfather, a Rolleiflex with a small macro lens, I found this special essence, or special mood of meeting with objects, and I felt this photography for me. So by mistake in a way, there was suddenly no negatives in Israel, and I found myself holding a digital camera, but compared to the 4x5 negative it was so shallow, the results. So I decided to think from the beginning of photography, and to think about this tool that painters used, creating kind of a grid on a glass, on a piece of a glass, and photographing the reality from each square in this grid, and then combine it together, maybe I can have something that is a little bit similar to this 4x5 aspect that really brings material inside.