SENSITIVE EMULSIONS

In the midst of our fast-paced and vertiginously ambitious realities, Sensitive Emulsions offers us a calm alternative with a powerful message. It demonstrates that beauty and wonder are everlasting. Despite their hazardous environment, these images encapsulate a sense of healing, bring contemplation and remind us that with perspective we can dance through impossible challenges. By walking around with a camera, Searle lets us access her point of view. One that sees even the most mundane things for what they really are: “life putting on a private show, just for us.”

Clearly mirroring her intrinsic experience of balancing an architectural background through photography, Searle breaks through the exhaustive and obsessive pursuit of perfection. Opposing the rigid, tough, patriarchal, powerful, and machista conventional norms by appreciating light, sensations, the ephemeral, and unobtrusive and silent observation instead.

This work communicates a union, a duality, and a fusion of opposites. Every level of this piece is drenched in a coming-togetherness of separate elements. From the logistics of travelling to the site with strict Covid-19 restrictions during lockdown, to the use of black and white, the dancers’ contrasting ethnicities, the story behind the music and even the choreography. The result is seemingly magical, but, “it’s their humanity, their nature, and their imperfections what makes them magical. What makes normal people, just like you and me, defy gravity and float above the ground with ease.”

Her obsession with immortalising ethereal moments like the ones captured on these photos began the day she took her first. At the age of ten she built a pinhole camera with a needle and coffee tin and, “probably photographed a person or something in nature,” she recalls. A stunning and hyper-realistic image of what she saw appeared on a paper covered with a photographic emulsion. A combination of a series of inorganic compounds that, when exposed to the light and the object she chose, became an item she could hold in her hands. A moment, forever.

Coming full-circle with this project, she catches beauty as it passes over a barren terrain, with stale lands stained purple and yellow. Toxic chemical leftovers, demolished power structures, thousands of footprints and the evident passage of time. With Sensitive Emulsions, Searle acts like the light passing through that coffee tin for us. Her images hold the sweetness of the piano’s melody, the powerful emotions of the dancers’ movements and the heavily loaded history of that time and place. She transforms unique moments in time into a tangible invitation for us to pause, feel and connect.

This work is a selection of moments from the official music video of one of pianist Roman Wróblewski’s tracks. “Big Hug,” a piece from his debut album, created from a state of pandemic-induced limbo and filmed by Andre Abrantini. Besides the hypnotising melody, the neoclassical tunes are also expressed through interpretive dance by Lucília Raimundo and Carolina Carloto, in an abandoned eerie industrial site in Barreiro, Portugal.

Quimigal was an industrial area founded at the beginning of the 20th century that housed the former CUF (Companhia União Fabril – one of the oldest and largest Portuguese industrial conglomerates). Where for decades sulfuric acid (H₂SO₄) was produced, typically used in the manufacturing of fertilisers, pigments, dyes, drugs, explosives, soaps and detergents. Therefore, the site also treated pyrite ash, a residue of H₂SO₄ production that is harmful to the environment and health when mismanagedOver 8000 employees worked there, yet it is loneliness and emptiness that fill its enormous spaces nowadays. During World War II the site closed its doors and the G.N.R. occupied its interior to set up a military base. Then, after the fall of Salazar, it eventually collapsed. Despite its current obsolescence, Searle somehow manages to show the ghostly remnants of its past. The dismantling of archaic systems and the falling apart of old and broken structures. But at the same time the coming together of things. The union of contrasting elements that she alchemised beautifully to remind us that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The way light needs darkness and white needs black, harsh architecture can use the softness of a dance, and the eternity of a ruin can become instant with a photo. Similarly, our escalating separation calls for more connection. In chemistry, like the soaps and detergents produced at Quimigal, emulsifiers are what enable the union of incompatible elements. And, through her perspective, Searle demonstrates that with our attitudes and behaviours we can become walking sensitive emulsifiers.

Photography by Josefa Searle

Words by Samantha Reis