Jeroen De Wandel: "For me, photography is a free jazz"

De Wandel’s work has been becoming more and more a mix of photography, collage and other types of visual/installation art. It’s no longer pure photography. However, he still starts out from his archive of (autobiographical) pictures, interests and experiences.

In this interview, he talks about his work and his career:

It depends on the mood of the day. In general, I'm influenced by music, psychology, science, and our society. Lately, this has been my visual playlist: Edith Dekyndt, Wolfgang Tillmans, Katrien De Blauwer, Christian Boltanski, Tomas Saraceno, Roger Ballen, Joan Fontcuberta, Paul Klee, Batia Suter, Jaromir Novotny, Doina Kraal, Vincent Delbrouck, Quentin Lacombe, Gerhard Richter, etc. My auditory playlist: Murcof, Fire Orchestra, Laurent Garnier, Neil Young, Holly Herndon, The Comet Is Coming, Pink Floyd, 9T Antiope, Karen Willems, Felicia Atkinson, Amon Tobin, Stan Getz, etc.

About my practice, I normally use material from my personal archive to generate new images. I combine, recompose, cut, tear, and paste both analogue and digital pictures in my search for the unexpected. My work is a mix of photography, collage, and other types of visual/installation art – sometimes presented as object, sometimes as picture/artefact of atelier made installations. The starting point is my archive of (autobiographical & found) pictures, my interests, and experiences. My main themes are time, memories, the working of the brain, the medium photography itself and its relation with paintings, and re-use/recycling.

The medium itself is quite interesting. For me, it’s a free jazz. Why should a picture be something you put on the wall? Why should it be something unique that you can only use once in a book or series? The way you combine pictures or compose them in an expo can make them change their meaning because of the associations you make. Therefore, I like to use my pictures in different settings – it’s like notes in a symphony.

I had a good time at Unseen Amsterdam and appreciated the work you did to set up conversations and giving me a stage to explain my photography. Futures can become a big support and platform for all those upcoming and struggling artists.

My work falls in between photography and visual arts; therefore, I struggle to get my work exhibited as it doesn’t fit in regular, classical photography environments. So, helping to get in touch with curators, galleries, etc. is very useful. Connect the artists to your network!

I have two book dummies ready that I would like to get published, but it’s not always clear how the business side of photography works. Extra contacts of publishers where my work could fit are certainly welcome too.

‘Amygdala’, my most recent project, refers to the place in the brains where emotional memories are created, stored, and processed. Recent research showed that we cannot trust our memories: they are constantly being processed and influenced by new events and experiences, as a foundation for future developments that might have an effect on our lives.

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People often don’t realize this manipulation, they don’t look any further, and extreme right parties know it and use this kind of propaganda to get to the power of politics.
We are kept blind, like the man with the towel on his head in the collage, and democracy shrinks every day, without a sound. If we look again at ‘Resolution 257’, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we see that we are further than ever from realizing it.

At this moment, I will keep on working on my current project-I’m not really working in series. And further experiments in my studio with more sculptural forms of photography are probably next.

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