UNSEEN INTERVIEW Part 1
in UNSEEN MAGAZINE
© Rachel Sato-Banks/Sophie Wright
Unseen talks to Regine
Petersen (b. 1976, Germany) about the effects that meteorites
have had on our planet, our society and her own photographic journey.
Tell us about your
creative process.
Being creative, for me, is about
learning and relating to the world in which I find myself posing many questions.
As a child this made me want to be an explorer, astronomer or palaeontologist. As
an artist, I find myself engaging with these interests in more playful and
associative ways, bringing together many different and contradictory aspects.
It’s a bit like blending disciplines and engaging with them through an ‘emotional
filter’. At other times, I think I became a photographer to be better able to endure
life’s ambiguities and turn them into something productive.
Where does your
fascination for meteorites come from?
Meteorites are like time
capsules, and many of them have remained unchanged since the formation of the
sun. Stony meteorites are agglomerates of the earliest dust, and in a way
their interior is like an ancient photograph.
I think it is mind-boggling
to hold something in your hand that existed before there was any life on earth,
even before there was an earth itself. I am intrigued by the materiality of
meteorites and by the fact that they can be looked at from many different
angles. They are geological, astronomical, but also historical and emotional
objects.
But I’m particularly interested in those instances when
our daily business on earth is interrupted by a meteorite falling from the sky. What happens when an ancient rock crashes into somebody's home in Alabama, falls to the feet of Rajasthani nomads, or is being witnessed by German school children? The
randomness and specificity of such an incident somehow resonates with me, that
it draws attention to a particular time and place. And then the whole matter
gets more complex, because historical accounts can only be incomplete and
inaccurate. So my work is not meant to be a reconstruction of events but more a
collection of traces and associations. Even though there is a lot of research
involved, I was somehow looking at the world from a meteorite’s point of
view, and it made everything seem even more fragile and strange to me.
Science and art. How do
you think two opposing ways of thinking, that of logic versus aesthetics, can
come together in contemporary photography?
I don’t think that art and
science are entirely opposite ways of thinking. They both share a curiosity and
an interest in the materiality of things. Observing an object closely and
looking at it with a sense of wonder is something that both scientists and
photographers have in common. Both may enable us to look at our environment from
a new perspective, so that an ordinary object like a rock or plant gains new significance. And I am convinced that most scientists look at their objects with both an examining eye as well as a poetic one.
Tell us about the work
that you will be presenting at Unseen.
I am represented by two
galleries at Unseen, which gives me the opportunity to show two chapters of my
photographic essay, Find a Fallen Star. Galerie Jo van de Loo is showing Stars Fell on Alabama and I am premiering The Indian Iron with East Wing.
Stars Fell on Alabama looks at the story of Ann Hodges, a woman who got
hit by a meteorite that fell through her roof. This story initiated the whole
meteorite project. I wanted to know what became of her, and then everything
branched out in many directions. I learned that a second fragment of the same
fall was found by a farmer named Julius McKinney when he went out to get
firewood with one of his mules. The work deals with these two people as
individuals yet also looks at the specific circumstances of being a white woman as well as a black man in 1950's Alabama, prior to the Civil Rights movement.
The other chapter, The
Indian Iron, brought me to a
completely different place. In 2006 a meteorite fell in Kanwarpura, a small
village in Rajasthan that cannot even be found on a map. According to Indian
press, two nomadic shepherds beat the meteorite with sticks and drowned it in
water. But as usual, things turned out to have been different.
Accessing information here
was more difficult due to the lack of documentation and the barriers of
language. I had to ask myself how embedded my quest for documentation was in
Western tradition, how I perceive other cultures, and how I am perceived. That
was when I started to accept the obstacles and incorporated them in my work. A
lot of the information remains hidden. But if you know how to read Hadoti the
perspective starts shifting.
