Essay on 1099 for Splash and Grab by Alex Merola, 2020
The year 2000 symbolised a precipice in time, ushering in one millennium in place of an expired one. This leap into what was collectively imagined as a “new age”, however, triggered anxieties among some. Popularly referred to as the “Y2K bug”, there were scares that computing programmes – many of which configured years by their final two digits – would be unable to distinguish 2000 from 1900 and result in widespread malfunctions; power stations would melt to the ground and planes would fall from the sky. As the clocks beeped out of 1999 and into what proved, anticlimactically, just another day, the naysayers were quick to deride the doomsdayers for their alleged myth-making.
Sybren Vanoverberghe’s second book, 2099 (2018), sought to echo a similar encounter with the unknown in its loose evocation of the year 2099, foreshadowing a future that has yet to transpire. His latest book, 1099, on the other hand, looks back to a history that never happened. Together, they represent Vanoverberghe’s ongoing meditation on the intersections between time, memory and place. And, by the recurrence of certain objects and imagery throughout these works producing a mirroring effect, the anthropocentric notion that time travels linearly is dismantled. They are still age-old questions: how did we get here? And equally, where are we going?
1099 takes us through a hazy topography of destruction, unveiling a constellation of fragments as if emerging from a memory, prophecy or dream. We stumble upon weathered rock formations, shattered relics, wrecks and ruins from sites geographically unspecified yet not altogether unfamiliar. These are remnants of lost worlds and eclipsed cultures – pieces of what we have knowingly or unknowingly left in our wake, and may leave still. In spite of our attempts to connect the dots, our relationship to these artefacts – and their potential as indicators of our locale along this trajectory of tragedy – is ambiguous and unresolved.
Night and day oscillate in circadian tides which rise and fall, engulfing the world in its cyclical flux. Woven together, Vanoverberghe’s photographs speak of an acute awareness of both the materiality of history as well as the impermanence of our interventions within the landscape. The toy house, its roof partly torn and on the verge of toppling, serves as an arresting metaphor for such a fate. While embodying humankind’s longing – from time immemorial – to imagine, create and leave legacies behind, it also reminds us that nothing is immune to the passages of time.
Another photograph depicts rolling desert dunes, vast and seemingly-infinite, from a bird’s eye view – that rare vantage point where we can deceive ourselves in comprehension of the totality of time’s canvas. Yet, as W.G. Sebald wrote in The Rings of Saturn (1995), “We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was”. Beyond the beauty and catastrophe, all that remains are shards which slip between our fingers, destined for decay. We can almost envisage Percy Bysshe Shelley’s proud yet doomed Ozymandias here, half-buried in the heaps. Inevitably, the lone and level sands stretch far away, collapsing unknowably into the past and the future.