On This Day / 在这一天

By Klara Kallstrom & Thobias Faldt and Thomas Sauvin
“Silvermine is an archive of 850 000 negatives salvaged in Beijing”
“Onthisday.com is the world’s largest historical events online database”
With their latest collaboration On This Day, visual artists Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt and Thomas Sauvin orchestrate an improbable encounter between these two sources.

Photographs: Beijing Silvermine
Text: On This Day https://www.onthisday.com/

“北京银矿是一个由85万余张拯救于北京的底片组成的档案库”
“Onthisday.com是世界上最大的在线历史事件数据库”
通过最新的合作“在这一天”，视觉艺术家苏文，克拉拉·卡尔斯特罗姆 (Klara Källström)和索比亚斯·费尔特 (Thobias Fäldt)为两个资源库编排了一场不可思议的相遇。

Award

Winner of Hasselblad Foundation Photo Book Grant 2021
Shortlisted for The Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards 2021

 Time Zone by Daniel Palmer

On November 17, 1997, a Chinese woman posed in front of a wallpaper cityscape of the New York skyline featuring the World Trade Center. Later, on August 23, 1998, and February 27, 2000, a scaled-down replica of the Twin Towers appeared behind middle-class Chinese visitors at a popular Beijing theme park filled with copies of world landmarks. Finally, on September 12, 2001, a photograph was taken off a TV screen showing the World Trade Center engulfed in flames. The event that became known as 9/11 was witnessed the following morning in China, and dramatically recasts the previous images, which together allude to some of the mediated ways that Chinese citizens have participated in recent American history. Personal photographs are largely impervious to public events, but their inescapable imprint is visible in retrospect.
On This Day is a new sample of Thomas Sauvin’s vast archive, ‘Beijing Silvermine’. That archive is the result of an intervention by the French collector that is now legendary:  anonymous colour negatives were salvage from being melted down for their silver content from a recycling plant on the outskirts of the city. Instead, over many years living in China and now back in Paris, Sauvin bought the dusty negatives by the kilo in old rice bags. Now numbering over 850,000, the negatives span twenty years from 1985 to 2005 – from the time amateur cameras, films and labs became widely available to the Chinese middle class to their disappearance with the rise of digital cameras.
These are not discarded memories, since the ‘original’ prints may still be safely treasured in family albums in Beijing. But Sauvin’s digital scanning of the discarded negatives has yielded an extraordinary alternative life for the images. The twilight of point-and-shoot film photography was also a time of massive transformation in Chinese society, and the archive provides a unique insight into everyday Chinese desires and aspirations. The standard repertoire of snap happy moments – birthdays, weddings, holidays, portraits of wives and girlfriends and cats – is supplemented by an unusually large number of photographs of people posing with new consumer items such as refrigerators and TVs, uniquely Chinese rituals such as brides lighting multiple cigarettes for men at weddings, military costumes, Mao posters and giant pandas.
Every image suggests a story. But Sauvin never wanted to be the sole author of the archive, and constantly seeks new perspectives on it in collaboration with others. Swedish artists Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt are logical collaborators, given their publications have also sought to excavate complex layers of history and explore the gaps between what is visible and knowable. When Sauvin gave them a hard drive with thousands of images to contemplate, they were drawn to the faded orange date-stamps that appear on about a quarter of the prints. For a brief window before the demise of popular film photography – prefiguring the embedded metadata of digital images – point-and-shoot cameras imprinted LCD-style dates onto negatives. Such photographs are literally an index of time itself.
Källström and Fäldt turned to the Internet for information about some of the specific dates, which alerted them to the popular history site onthisday.com, with its lists of political and sporting events, celebrity marriages and deaths. The site is probably most visited by people seeking to discover what happened on the day they were born, and offers a relentlessly Euro-American perspective – with scant information about Chinese history. By using the date stamped photographs to drive their investigation, one readymade archive driving the other, they force together two incommensurable sources of incomplete information about the world. “Two inadequate descriptive systems”, as Martha Rosler might say, the gap between them complicating the self-evidentiary claims of each other, revealing their obvious omissions and biases.
Sauvin’s image archive points to China’s ambivalent relationship to the West. Simulations of the New York skyline, a single bottle of Perrier, a Chinese basketballer posing in front of a poster of US player Michael Jordan, a party of giggling women the day the World Wide Web was born, a Chinese tourist posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, obscured by a finger over the lens. In this context, amateur mistakes and damaged images take on a particular pathos. Temporally and culturally displaced, photographs that once made sense to someone intimate become a puzzle – eccentric, abstract and poetic (someone doing a push-up with a pillow on their back, a woman sitting on a bed with a hand over her face in front of a poster of a nude). We are always on the outside; we know nothing about the scenes beyond their rough location and precise date, charging them with mystery.
The scanned images were printed in Paris, their corners rounded, then sent to Sweden to be glued to pages where events from onthisday.com have been hand-typed on a manual typewriter. So-called “event of interest”, according to the website, are highlighted with an actual highlighter pen. In this way the book simulates a quasi-bureaucratic archive and evokes something like evidence. But the evidence is nonsensical and apparently random. The images are not even organised chronologically. Instead, they are arranged by a number appearing at the bottom right of each page, which represents the order the negatives were first scanned into Sauvin’s archive. The fact that 9/11 is the last image in the book suggests another narrative. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center marked the symbolic end of the American century. Just as the list of celebrity divorces points to Western decadence, the found photographs hint at the birth of what is now known as the Chinese century. On the day the American poet William Burroughs died, a fluffy white cat stretched upwards on a chair in Beijing.

 Time Zone 时区 by Daniel Palmer （丹尼尔•帕默）

1977年11月17日，一位中国妇女在以世贸中心为特色的纽约天际线城市景观的墙纸前留影。1998年8月23日和2000年2月27日，一座仿制的缩小版双子塔出现在了中国中产阶级游客身后，在北京的这一广受欢迎的主题公园里，处处都是世界地标的复制品。2001年9月12日，一张从电视屏幕上翻拍下的照片展示了被火焰吞噬的世贸中心，在中国的人们于次日清晨得知这一被称为“911事件”的恐怖袭击。 “911事件”极大地重塑了先前的一些影像，那些共同影射了中国公民间接参与美国当今历史的影像。私人照片很大程度上不会受到公共事件的影响和干预，但当回顾时，总有一些难以避免的印迹被留下。
《在这一天》是苏文庞大档案库“北京银矿”里的一个新样本。已成传奇的“北京银矿”档案库是这位法国收藏家介入的成果：大量无主的彩色胶片被拯救于北京郊区的一个回收站，避免了被溶于酸液销毁、提炼成硝酸银的命运。在北京生活数年后，苏文搬回了巴黎。他以旧米袋为单位回收这些灰尘满布的底片，这些底片的数量现已超过85万张，时间跨度为1985年到2005年——从“傻瓜相机”、胶卷和洗印店广泛进入中国中产阶级的生活，到胶片相机随着数码相机的流行逐渐被取代。
这些并不算是被丢弃的记忆，因为冲洗出来的原版照片很有可能仍被珍藏在北京居民的家庭相册中。但是苏文对这些废弃底片进行的数字扫描带给了这些影像另一种非同寻常的生命。“傻瓜相机“胶片摄影的黄昏同时也是中国社会大规模转型的时期，这一档案库为了解中国人的日常欲望与理想提供了独特视角。除了常规的幸福瞬间——如记录生日、婚礼、节日，拍摄妻子、女友或猫的肖像之外，还有大量的照片记录了人们与时髦新产品（如冰箱和电视）的合影、独特的中国仪式（如新娘在婚礼上为男宾点燃多支香烟）、军装照、毛泽东海报以及大熊猫。
每张照片都讲述着一个故事。但苏文从未想过要成为这个档案库的唯一作者，他不断地与他人合作以寻求新的视角。瑞典艺术家Klara Källström和Thobias Fäldt是一对合适的合作者人选，因为他们的出版物也试图深挖复杂的历史层次、探索可见与可知之间的差距。当苏文给他们一个含有数千张图片的硬盘供他们思考时，他们被约有四分之一频率出现的照片上褪色的橙色日期所吸引。“傻瓜相机”印在底片上的LCD式日期，曾作为胶片摄影衰落之前的一个简要窗口，预兆了数字图像时代嵌入式元数据的到来。这类照片本身即是时间的索引。
Källström和Fäldt在互联网上寻找一些有关具体日期的信息，他们注意到了这个受欢迎的历史网站onthisday.com，上面有些政治、体育事件列表，以及名人结婚和死亡的名单。访问onthisday.com的人可能大多数只是感兴趣他们出生的那天发生了什么，但该网站提供了一个无情的欧美视角——关于中国历史的信息很少。通过利用盖有日期戳的照片来推动他们的调查研究，用一个现成的档案库驱动另一个，Källström和Fäldt把两个难以较量的、关于世界的不完整信息源强行联系在一起。正如玛莎·罗斯勒(Martha Rosler)所说，“两个不充分的描述系统”，它们之间的差距使彼此自证的主张复杂化，暴露出各自明显的遗漏和偏见。
苏文的图像档案库指向中西方间的矛盾关系。纽约天际线的仿制图；一瓶Perrier气泡水；一位中国篮球运动员在美国球员迈克尔•乔丹的海报前摆拍；万维网诞生当天几名女性聚在一起咯咯笑；一个中国游客在埃菲尔铁塔前摆好姿势，被镜头前的一根手指遮住。在这种语境下，业余的错误和损坏的图像具有一种特殊的悲怆。时间与文化颠覆位移，那些曾经对某个亲密的人有意义的照片变成了谜——古怪的、抽象的和诗意的（背着枕头做俯卧撑的人；坐在床上的女人，在一张裸体海报前用手捂脸）。我们总是在外面，我们对这些场景一无所知，除了它们的大致位置和准确日期。这一切让它们神秘无比。
这些扫描的图像印刷于巴黎，磨圆边角后送到瑞典，黏在用手工打字机输入的印有onthisday.com历史事件的纸页上，再用真正的荧光笔标亮出那些onthisday.com称为“趣闻”的条目。通过这种方式，这本书好似一本官方档案，唤起一些类似证据的东西。但这些证据显然是随机的、荒谬的。这些照片甚至都没有按照时间顺序排列，而是按照每页右下角出现的数字大小排列的，这些数字代表这些底片当时被扫描添加到苏文档案库中的顺序。“911事件”是书中最后一张照片，这一事实暗示了另一种叙事：发生在世贸中心的恐怖袭击标志着美国世纪的象征性结束。正如名人离婚列表指向西方的颓废一样，这些拾得摄影暗示了如今所称的“中国世纪”的诞生。在美国诗人威廉•巴勒斯去世的那天，一只毛茸茸的白猫趴在北京的一把椅子上仰头张望。