[Winter 2025]
Broken Spectre
by Sylvain Campeau
Centre PHI, Montréal
22.05.2024 — 15.09.2024
[EXCERPT]
Characteristic of the artist Richard Mosse’s practice is his use of photographic apparatuses designed for purposes other than art or documentation. For his series The Enclave, The Castle, and Incoming, he appropriated technological devices intended for surveillance, control, and monitoring of the human presence.
For the Broken Spectre project – including the exhibition presented at the PHI Centre, composed of large-format photographs and a video installation – Mosse used a multispectral camera, capable of recording human thermal signatures, as he had done for The Castle and Incoming. This time, however, his camera was loaded with infrared film and his subject wasn’t human bodies; shooting from a helicopter, he captured the vegetation of Amazonia, a region prey to deforestation, in search of natural ecosystems that might be of interest for economic exploitation. Indeed, this very technology is used by the mining and agri-food industries to uncover a territory’s productive potential.
Translated by Käthe Roth
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Richard Mosse, Broken Spectre – Sylvain Campeau]
Sylvain Campeau contributes to many Canadian and European magazines. The author of seven poetry collections and several essays on the visual arts, he published Écrans motiles with Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal in 2022. As a curator, he has organized some forty exhibitions.