Zoé Komkommer
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. In a serene and poetic way, she tries to hold together all the puzzle pieces that make up her life.
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 see it as capturing memories that I want to preserve. They are moments I crave while they are still happening. A ray of light falling in, 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 of our family have always been a great inspiration for me. In my photo book That We Were There that I released in early July 2023, 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 of 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, which in a way I haven’t lost.
“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. While 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 open my senses. With the music and the subject matter in mind, I look. Our collaboration feels extra interesting because my images are often described as ‘silent’, and now I explicitly seek the link with sound. Depending on the moment, music, like images, can take on so many different meanings.”