Living above the lines, Frontviews

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How to swallow an eye from a face is a portrait series of all residents of Fabrica Research Centre’s residency program of March-July 2024. The residency is based in a 17th Century Villa, transformed by Tadao Ando, located outside of Treviso, Veneto Region, Italy. 

In response to the theme ‘kinship’, Frederik Marks asked each resident to express themselves in their clothes, while creating an atmosphere inspired by Ira Cohen's series ‘Into the Mylar Chamber’. Iras's method was to photograph his subjects in the reflections of a mirror foil to make images that blur both the subject and the viewer's expectation of how a body can look. During the shoot, the photographer stands next to the model instead of facing the model head-on.

How to swallow an eye from a face

The knee of another

The sun burns skin, but in a couple of years it will boil blood

Blazing blue flames wake me up. The air tastes like hot ash with a trace of sulphur. As I look through my window overlooking the city, I see in central position a bird sitting on top of one of the old blast furnaces. Down below are black dotted caterpillars eating away at leaves and trees until there’s no more air to breathe. The heat is excruciating. Glass first cracks and then melts away. The scene intoxicates me. The brightness of the hot iron blinds me. Blisters gum up my retina. Bright glowing iron crawls up my skull, flowing through my hair and down my veins. I feel as though death is close but until then I never felt so alive.

The sun burns skin is a fictional short story shot in and around  former Stalinstadt. The city is dying: The youngest city of Germany was planned from scratch and solely designed around the steel mill. When Germany was reunited, a combination of optimisation and location led to a declining production and workforce. Of the former 30,000 steelworkers, only 2,000 remain. The inhabitant’s and also the city’s identity is in crisis because it was all constructed around the steel mill. It feels as though the steel flowing out of the blast furnace is both the artery that keeps the city alive, as well as cancer that eats it alive.

Eisenhüttenstadt’s destiny reflects what will be coming for many former soviet cities surrounding large industrial plants. Inevitably, the switch to renewable energy and sustainable production will come, and once it does it will do so abruptly, leaving the local working-class disrooted. Yet, even if we manage to somehow turn the wheel on climate change it might already be too late to prevent catastrophe: Industrial processes are so ingrained in our identity that they seem to run through our veins like a poison we cannot live without. The young man in the series faces this uncertain future in which the world as he knows it will first crumble and then come crashing down, leaving behind an industrial wasteland.

The sun burns skin

‘He has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown. “Most men will not swim before they are able to.” Is that not not witty? Naturally, they won’t swim! they are born for the solid earth not water. And naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes. and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his buisness, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.’

Detective Cooper enters the “Black Lodge” and discovers the truth behind the seemingly incomprehensible murders in Twin Peaks. A case far too complex for him to solve becomes subject to his imagination. He is interpreting hos environment to the extent where he confuses the ‘real’ from the imaginary.
Heavily inspired by Twin Peaks Frederik Marks tries to make sense of the South Goan landscape on a Christmas holiday drowning in the complexity of his own imaginary storyline.

One day he will drown

Beneath the sun of the dead bird
spreads infenitely the plain
there is no death more serene: 
show me some of your body

The possibility of an island, Michel Houellebecq

Beneath the sun of the dead bird

Most miserable man! Slave to passion- lost to reason- tossed upon a sea of anguish, like some shattered wreck, amid the fretful storm! Hast thou no hope? No chance to rise from the ruins of grief? – Is there not one solitary spark- one last lingering ray of hope still left to animate thy sluggish spirits, and rouse thee up to cast thy shackles off, and rise above thy desolation, and tower aloft, and soar sublime o’er all thy bitter woes and sharp calamities?

Yes, poor mortal! Degraded as thou art! Miserable as is thy condition! Yet thou hast one hope left! One rock still peers above the dashing spray- one beacon blaze still burs amidst the storm- one plank still remains, the last remnant of thy shattered ship, on which thou mayest escape the fury of the raging sea! It is the Pledge! The Temperance Pledge:

It inculcates love to God, and universal love to mankind; - purity of purpose to carry out the great objects for which our order was founded- and fidelity to the obligations and exhalted views of our institution 
“Truth Virtue and Honor,” are also principles which should even adorn the character of the Sons of Temperance: true to the performance of every obligation and of various duties; virtuous in all actions whether public or private; and honorable in all his conduct, and in every transaction with his fellow creatures.

Let our enemies say what they will- let them do as they may, they will yet find, that they are beating against a rock, which the billows of the ocean cannot move, and which the lightning’s of heaven cannot harm. To remind us of the principles of our Order, and to impress more forcibly upon our minds, the duties which they inculeate, we have adopted certain emblems. The Red, the White, and the Blue, are the colors of our Order, and are the emblematiael of “Love, Purity and Fidelity.”