Trigger

As she works in her living room as well as in the kitchen, there is no distinction between the artist’s studio and her home. In the messy muddle of everyday life, in between cooking, social activities, and the baseline stress of just surviving, collages and assemblages are made. I see piles of photographic prints and collages everywhere, loosely organized in folders of different sizes, scattered on large tables, on the wool carpet, on cozy sofas, and on shelves. Wooden frames hold prints and pictures in provisional arrangements – possible montages not yet fixed. Mounted on large paper strips hanging from the walls, prints are glued atop one another or aligned in horizontal sequences, like sentences to be read. Photographs are stuck on cardboard boxes and incorporated in sculptural bricolages standing crisscross on the windowsills and on the ground. At least three printers and a few computers give the living room the appearance of a laboratory, a frenzied print shop, or a domestic hotbed.

Everywhere the winged creatures announce themselves. The place is full of birds, birds, birds. Reduced to an abstract black silhouette, the motif of the bird is repeated in most of the visible compositions. Dark flocks flying against grey skies or landing in trees, grainy close-ups of crows and jackdaws create an emotional imaginary landscape of appearing and disappearing flying beings. The folders are titled: ‘Birds & Paint’, ‘Birds & Nudes’, ‘Black Birds’, ‘More Birds’, ‘Monochrome Birds’…

'Don’t explain', she says, 'move around it, like circling lines of thoughts. Walk with me. How does my work resonate with you?'

Since the death of her husband, Mark Babski, more than a year and a half ago, her insistence on the bird motif has become an obsession, a near identification, and perhaps a magical way of reconnecting to the missed loved one. The photographed birds are touched upon with a vividly coloured paint brush, caressed with sticky fingers, and scratched with graphite. Their fleeting presence as shadowy spirits suggests love lost and a message from the other side. She posts on Instagram, ‘Birds who dissolve, resolve, remind and rewind the winds and I can feel the warm air under their wings.’

‘Every love story is a potential grief story’, says Julian Barnes in his novel Levels of Life. ‘You put together two people who have not been put together before … Sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that one, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible, but it is emotionally possible.’^{Julian Barnes, Levels of Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 2013), 67.}

We’ve been talking for a year now, and every encounter changes my experience of the work, and every time again I lose my notes. Looking and thinking together, we pass back and forth the patterns we weave, proposing and inventing string figures as in a cat’s cradle game. I have become part of the creative process in a certain way, just as she becomes part of my writing. We are soul sisters in mourning a love lost. We are survivors in staying with the trouble. Inspired by a great documentary on Donna Haraway, Fabrizio Terranova’s Story Telling for Earthly Survival – a film we saw together at the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts – her book Staying with the Trouble became a common reference in our correspondence.^{Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin with the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).}

But let’s return to my basic position in the studio: sitting on the floor with the ‘papiers collées’, trying to grasp what makes me come back again and again and what eludes and fascinates me in this work.

Everybody who has observed an artist in her studio knows that the artistic practice is the riskiest form of thinking in a space of creative uncertainty.^{Dirk Lauwaert, ‘Moi, j’aime les professeurs! (op een melodie van Offenbach)’, in De Witte Raaf 122 (2011), https://www.dewitteraaf.be/artikel/detail/nl/3091.} While working, Cordemans intuitively and impatiently shifts, moves, stacks, masks, and unveils (parts of) pictures. She paints over and draws on the prints, she glues and layers, isolates and combines. How far can you go in the editing process? Taking a photo of a photo of a photo, misinterpreting and decontextualizing found images, finding impossible angles, she subverts their meaning. She inverses, reverses, distorts, and cleaves, flips sides and folds, mirrors and pins. In this ongoing process, she follows coincidence and welcomes happenstance. Commanding her devices without technical know-how, she experiments with the instrumentarium of computers and printers like a jazz musician playing her battery without knowing how to read notes. Giving up control, she sabotages and manually intervenes in the mechanical program of her apparatus.

Again and again, a given image is juxtaposed with a strange element. Attacking the self-contained autonomy of the image, the artist seems to aim at a perpetual perceptual shifting, creating totally different mutations of the same thing. In this way she accepts and performs in her work what Haraway calls ‘the risk of radical contingency, of putting relations at risk with other relations, from unexpected worlds.’ Montage is not putting a priori units together, because ‘when it works, something new is made and the world is changed.’ In the unique relation of the chance encounter, something is created that is ‘greater than the sum of what was there.’ Nothing can be seen in itself. Nothing is ever just one thing.

Again and again, the fixed is destabilized in the mutable by an inspirational gesture, a sudden gust of wind. In this way, Cordemans unlocks the potential for surprising change. Can we see new possibilities in any given moment? Can we trust our experience? Can we think through precarity, as Anna Tsing asks us to do?