Becomings: Protographs for Sick Bacchus
Monika K. Adler and Aeon Rose
This protographic imagery is the brittle, semi-transparent skin sloughed from conventionally captured photography; a holograph of a moment in time combined with a fiction. We wandered through the White stucco mansion houses of South Kensington for hours to form the structure of this skin, each scale crenelated, ballustrated, held together by arterial black-lead ironwork, marked for restoration and reification, and holding within it a xenolithic stratum of capital. Private houses and clubs, embassies of current and former states, threshold places of meeting and consumption. Emptiness. Cycles of speculation and succession. Ostentation built from skeletonised human capital.
Economic stratification within late-capitalist society leads to parallel, yet profoundly different experiences of time, place, and the fulfilment of desire. One city overlaid on another. Phase-shifted, secured, and constantly maintained, the wealthy become as spectres, moving effortlessly through the city, inhabiting a domain unconstrained by the concerns of most of the population. At the end of the day, we observed through one window a woman perfectly poised upon a couch, preserved in a vitrine of Georgian wood panelling, arranged around her a museum archive of antiques and old masters; an unheimlich avatar of the unyielding grip of the English establishment.
– Aeon Rose, 2025 ©
