Constellation (Reading Maryon Park)

Bernd Behr, stills from Constellation (Reading Maryon Park), 2016/19, single channel video installation, continuous loop.

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up, the photographer Thomas, played by David Hemmings, believes to have inadvertently witnessed a murder in a series of photographs he took in a park which he subsequently enlarges to granular abstraction in his forensic paranoia. Constellation returns to the scene of the crime by reading the grounds of Maryon Park in South-East London where the photographs were taken in the film, enlisting the augmented reality version of Google Translate to elicit a latent text as it attempts to recognise Chinese characters in the park’s foliage. Producing a concrete poem found in translation, the semantic collateral of this machinic pareidolia echoes the aleatory obsessions that is "the constellation" of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, whose short story Las Babas Del Diablo (1959) was itself the basis for Blow-Up, and whose main character was a professional translator who only practiced photography as a hobby.


Exhibitions: ​Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London, 2019.