Landscape Stories: Can you tell about your relationship with the nature and with the threes in particular? I’m referring to the series “Yakushima, ”Mapping”, “Nature”.
Kim Boske: Nature has a special relationship with chaos and order. In nature, patterns are never completely regular and they never seem to repeat themselves in the exact same fashion. It is amazing how mathematical systems can describe processes of which the outcome is unpredictable. Nature is overwhelming. It possesses a bizarre quantity of information, structures and processes. It is interwoven with everything. Different aspects fascinate me every time. In I go walking in your landscape I walk around in a park. Walking means taking paths. Without this movement along paths the park cannot be comprehended.
Landscape Stories: Can you tell me about the use (as well as concepts) of representation of the nature, interpretation, and value in your series?
Kim Boske: For example the starting point for my “Kanazawa” series is my interest in the way that a great part of the Japanese world experience nature, where nature and culture are not each other opposites. At the same time they model nature like it is a statue. Most of the Japanese gardens are constructed with great precision (and an absolute eye for detail) from the perspective of the spectator. The ultimate experience of nature is one of the perfect constructed nature. In “Kanazawa” I construct an image out of my encounter and experience with one of Japans most beautiful gardens, the Kenroku-en. The work consist out of five photographs, each existing out of the same starting material, trying to two-dimensionally represent multiple perspectives of the same place simultaneously in a synthetic whole. Where i “map” my own journey in time and space onto the circumference of a Japanese garden.
Landscape Stories: When does a serie born? When does your research begin?
Kim Boske: I build images that consist of transitions, shifts and changes. This way I try to make the complex possibilities of the “now” tangible. The result may be a field of differentials, but as a field it forms an unequivocal unity. It takes a precise and arduous process of balancing to achieve this.
Landscape Stories: You are dutch: in your historical art tradition a topographic representation of the landscape is recurrent. What have you inherited from it?
Kim Boske: Not necessarily, although the art of painting did play a significant role in Stories. The construction of the flower bouquets in this series has a strong resemblance to the old flower still lives, where the old painters would sketch flowers during the different periods of their bloom and eventually bring these phases together in the final painting.
Landscape Stories: You are fascinated by the passing of time. For example your flower still-life serie were composed by combining several different shots of the some subject, with a changing light playing an important role. Can you tell something about it?
Kim Boske: My investigation concerns itself, both in its content and visually, with the network of the Time system. This Time system intrigues me in all its possible shapes and forms. To me reality is an unlimited field of differentials, which move disorderly alongside each other and together form the unity of being. What fascinates me is a reality and a way of thinking that presents itself more as “becoming” rather than “being”. The series “Stories” forms the beginning of this ongoing investigation. It was my thesis project in 2005, an investigation of the merging of different moments of the day in a photographic image, where photography seems to derive its rationale from its being bound up with time and is usually considered the ultimate proof of this one single moment. I let go of the “now” and allow my ideas to form meaning through different layers. In Stories I do this by showing the charged quality of a place by connecting the characters of different objects in that place. This creates a new time frame, which can be recognized by its aberrance, or perfection. I rearrange the passing of time and light which gives space a different, tangible meaning. I am concerned with the interplay between the passing and dissolving of time.
Landscape Stories: Can you tell me about the ”I go walking in your landscape” serie?
Kim Boske: In “I go walking in your landscape”, I investigates how physical movement in time and space continually changes our perspective on the world. By letting go of the individual perspective and bringing together multiple perspectives in one image, a new layered reality comes into existence. This project took place in the differen’t city gardens of Amsterdam. In this project I was very inspired by the following words: “A consciousness that could not imagine, would be hopelessly mired in the “real,” incapable of the perception of unrealized possibilities, and thus any real freedom of thought or choice. In order to imagine, a consciousness must be able to posit an object as irreal—nonexistent, absent, somewhere else and it does so always from a particular point of view. All of our engagements with the world have the potential to activate the imaginary process. And because the imaginary process relies on intentionality, the world is constituted not from the outside into our consciousness, but rather we constitute the world based on our intentions toward it.” (Sartre)
Landscape Stories: In your opinion which is your more iconic photo?
Kim Boske: By working from a moving but continuous given a close connection is achieved between the different works. New connections and parallels are starting to exist between different works. I see my work as a process for that case i can not name you my more iconic photo.
Interview curated by Camilla Boemio