Kateryna Snizhko

The project Debris is paper-based. I was volunteering at a Riso workshop and I started to review the test prints. There you have this waste of someone’s try-outs printed out on top of someone else’s – it’s like an overlap of different imagery. It was so fascinating, and at first I wasn’t thinking of photography, I was discovering the limits of the imagery. My research is also closely connected to the topic of artistic practice and so the process itself is often much more important for me than the result.Now we are talking about failures and try-outs, but when you go to a museum everything is perfect and these traces of process have almost vanished. You’re always guessing how it was made. I started to think, what is failure?

This work is basically made by an invisible collective who are not aware of their collective production; the final work was not orchestrated by anyone so it was not clearly conceptually shaped. Artists always make these huge images about disaster and the planet, trash, junk on the street, nature, but we never talk about how we influence this process. I also felt that it’s not just about material waste, but also about the waste of ideas, the consumption of time and all the elements of this artistic process. In this project, photography is one of the mediums that helps to bring the most visual information to the viewer.