COMMON LAND
«Each image being a singular point of view, traversed by the beings who inhabit the places.»
From 19 April to 13 May 2017, the MAAC in Brussels hosted "Common land", the first solo exhibition by Belgian photographer Laetitia Bica.
In Great Britain, before the 18th century, the term "COMMON LAND" referred to land belonging to one or several persons, over which other individuals — known as "commoners" — enjoyed certain customary rights of use. Laetitia Bica proposes to repurpose this concept to interrogate, in artistic terms, the common space that shapes both the multiple, sometimes contradictory, aspects of her photographic practice, and the different ways in which the images she produces can be used.
The exhibition gives the photographer the opportunity to present two years of intensive work, rich in encounters and associations, also punctuated by many doubts, during which Laetitia Bica repeatedly pushed further in her experiments with material intervention in photography. This interventionism appears as the recurring theme across the various works on display.
The photographer's approach, however, goes well beyond the simple act of taking pictures. Her residency at the MAAC gave Laetitia Bica the opportunity to question the artistic value of installation as such, exploring, for example, the new perceptual worlds opened up by printing on glass, PVC, and fabric. The viewer moves among images distributed throughout the white space. The gaze is drawn in by the arrangement of dynamic perspectives; each image being a singular point of view, traversed by the beings who inhabit the places.
Finally, Laetitia Bica invites us to discover the first fruits of a year of intensive experimentation at the edges of photography, in the studio of Liège-based photographer Jean Janssis — a master and specialist in gum bichromate printing. This technique, developed in the 19th century within the Pictorialist movement, pushes the photographer's intervention to a limit point where the image leaves the firm ground of "objective" representation to enter the pragmatic field of disruptive human actions. The photographed subject is submerged in pigments and dissolves into the chemical residues left by the "stripping" of the different material layers exposed to ultraviolet light.
