B’Rock Orchestra’s House Artist frames in a bigger picture within our unique desire for connecting enthusiasm. From this desire comes the motivation to share experience, knowledge, and above all: the love of music with young professionals. Likewise with young visual artists where we collaborate with young talent every season.
Zoé Komkommer (born 1998) is a photographer based in Antwerp – Belgium. At a young age, she was inspired by her mother who took pictures of their family with an analogue camera, a type of camera she now uses.
Zoé Komkommer captures scenes from her everyday life. Her images are outward signs of the life she leads, kept out of an underlying fear that all may one day be lost.
“I see it as capturing memories that I want to preserve. They are moments I crave while they are still happening. A ray of light, a curtain moving, a hand on a shoulder. Again and again, they are fractions of the everyday, carrying something in them that catches my eye.
“The family photos my mother took have always been a great inspiration for me. In my photo book That We Were There, released in early July, I not only used my mother’s images as inspiration but brought them together with my own. From my own archive, built up in and around a family home in southern France, I combined my images with those by my mother. Images she photographed in the same place years ago.
“By combining our archives, I felt that as a maker I could create a kind of past future time in which the family house defined our centre. Which made me feel like I could return to a lost time that, in a way, I haven’t lost.”
Zoé Komkommer tries to go beyond the visible of the day-to-day, and dwell on time and memory. Concepts that keep changing over the years. Her reality is bridged by a dreamlike world, in which she hovers between the fragility of existence and the power of being. Her work can be described as suffused with a warm melancholy.
“I especially love the slowness of analogue photography. How the images quietly fade in my mind until they reappear when developing the roll of film. I proceed slowly, but once my film roll is developed everything speeds up. Again and again, I am curious about the result.
“When I flip through my archive and dwell on some images – a detail of a skirt, a loved one sleeping – I think back to the whole of that moment. But that whole remains, to the viewer, invisible. Capturing these moments allows me to immortalise the memory of the whole in a sense.
“For my new work for B’Rock, I just open my senses. With the music and the projects’ themes in mind, I look. Our collaboration feels extra interesting because my images are often described as ‘quiet’, and now I am explicitly looking for the link with sound. Depending on the moment, music, like images, can take on so many different meanings.”
