Batia Suter and the epic of the gaze

One day, in the mid-2000s, Batia Suter received an email from someone asking her what the connection was between her work and Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas Mnemosyne . She had seen a draft of what would later become Parallel Encyclopedia , his now legendary first book, published in 2007. The Swiss artist, in her Amsterdam studio, was forced to Google the name of the great German scholar . She didn't know who he was. It took her a few seconds to understand the near-superimposition of the two projects. Today, she tells Il Foglio that it was a shock from which she took two weeks to recover. "What was the point of continuing that immense effort if someone had done the same thing a century earlier?" She ordered books, read, studied. What unfolded before her was the fascinating and mysterious world of the German historian and art critic, "Hamburgian at heart, Jewish by blood, Florentine at heart," who in his lifetime collected 65,000 volumes and 8,000 photographs of works of art. In the last years of his life, he began working on a project—which remained unfinished—consisting of panels in which he grouped images of artworks from all eras to demonstrate how certain iconographic themes of Western culture recur over time. A utopian and marvelous project. A new way of studying the history of art through photographic reproductions. An adventure that was suddenly cut short in 1929 by a heart attack.

But Batia, rather than being paralyzed by the comparison, found a companion in Warburg. "I had found someone familiar with my way of thinking. I began to feel like a brother to him, for who he was and for the way he researched. At the time, he had to order images from all over the world, spending a lot of money. I, on the other hand, had the privilege of simply scanning them from the books I collected. Then, of course, he was interested in Greek culture, the Renaissance, and the functioning of bodies. I'm not very good at constructing theories. Mine, rather, is an attempt to bring high and low culture into collision." Indeed, Parallel Encyclopedia, a six-hundred-page volume produced over five years of mad and desperate labor, is more than a tool for study and analysis; it is an epic of the gaze, which certainly has the monumental dimension of the encyclopedic, but seems to mock the rationalism of Diderot and his companions. Yet, within it lies a boundless love for the power of images: for their ability to speak a language of their own and dialogue with each other, producing new and unexpected meanings.

Today, nearly twenty years after the publication of Parallel Encyclopedia, Batia Suter is a leading name in the world of photography. Few have worked as convincingly and radically with archival research as she has, which has become one of the most beloved and developed strands of contemporary photography . Alongside her publications, Suter has translated her research into monumental installations using her image collections. She was a finalist for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2018, and in the same year exhibited at Le Bal in Paris, one of the most important photography venues. This year she won the Swiss Design Award and is presenting a solo exhibition at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, entitled “Octahydra.” Her installation from Parallel Encyclopedia, created by juxtaposing 80 books, opened and stacked, so that the photographs engage in a dialogue, is currently on display in the permanent collection at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Suter's passion for images began early, at 14. It was then that she began carrying a camera with her wherever she went. She spent hours developing and printing film in the darkness of a darkroom. She enrolled at the Zurich School of Design, then moved to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Arnhem, Netherlands. "I began painting and drawing by enlarging my photographs. I would project the images and trace them, a very physical and intense process. But it was also stressful—I had to work at night to have darkness for the projection, and I needed large spaces. I realized I couldn't continue like that until I was eighty. But even then, I wasn't so much interested in technique, painting, or photography, as in understanding images and their effect on me." After graduating, she enrolled in a master's program in typography. It was the late 1990s, and Batia was unfamiliar with computers, but in that course she discovered two programs that would irreversibly shape her career: Photoshop and QuarkXPress. The first to process the scanned images, the second to arrange the photographs on the pages of a potential book. "That's when I started collecting used books. I started scanning all the images that interested me. I'd print them on A4 sheets and lay them out on the floor. I worked in an open space and there were a lot of people passing by. At a certain point, people would stop and ask me for copies of the images that had struck them most."

There Batia understands something fundamental: her thoughts proceed through images. But not only that: everyone has their favorites, depending on their background and interests. Yet there are some that interest everyone. "There are photographs that have to do with something we have in common. There's something in them that has a special power, capable of captivating us." This is the starting point for her research. What are these images? Why are some of them so timeless? She wants to understand. Her fascination with images becomes like a drug. A kind of addiction. And when she begins to work with the layout program, she feels a new sense of freedom. Being able to experiment, with a previously unthinkable ease, juxtaposing, exchanging, and inverting the collected material seems like a frontier for an exploration that seems endless. She had finally found her tool.

The first mirror that opens Parallel Encyclopedia shows us works by Julian Stanczak, Marina Apollonio, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Marcello Morandini, Tadasky, and Masuho Ohno, all artists associated with the Optical Art movement . These are surprising geometries, designed to enchant or deceive the eye of the viewer. Turning the page, however, we find images of plankton, in which microscopic marine organisms are arranged in geometric patterns that recall those seen previously. In the same mirror, however, we also see the pattern used for test shots to calibrate the cameras' grayscales, made up of circles, lines, and triangles. The shapes echo one another. Further on, we find photographs of planets, shells, and everyday utensils. Further on, we find enlargements of snowflakes and ancient cameos inlaid with human figures. The further we go, the deeper we delve into a story built on visual analogies and shared meanings. Without a discernible break in continuity, on page 50, we encounter atomic explosions, American aircraft carriers, and car accidents. On page 300, we see an eighteenth-century stool whose legs, in the next plate, rhyme with those of oxen pulling a plow. This opens a section entirely dedicated to horses: engravings, paintings by Velázquez and Simone Martini. There's even a photo of a tiger, with its tamer, placidly on the shoulders of an elephant. Buster Keaton next to a medieval miniature. Dürer and an Assyrian sculpture. African art, X-rays, commercial catalogs. Centripetal and centrifugal force. Tintoretto and Yves Klein, Giotto and Walker Evans. A fascinating journey, a narrative-free flow, yet one that manages to capture the attention like the plot of a thriller. Where will the next page lead?

After the one with Aby Warburg, Batia Suter's journey has come to an unexpected end. "My mother is a psychologist. Once, while I was talking to her in her office, I was browsing through her books and my eye fell on Man and His Symbols by Carl Gustav Jung. I picked it up and started reading it." It was a new shock for the artist: "Again, his way of considering images was really close to mine. He speaks of 'Urbilder,' of original images developed by the unconscious and common to all humanity." Jung studies dreams, fantasies, and religious symbols to demonstrate the recurrence of certain universal imaginative forms. "It's a very strong idea, according to which human beings all react the same way to certain visual information. It's something natural. And, for me, this is very clear. I'm convinced that something like this exists; on a primitive level, we are stimulated by certain themes and images and their qualities." Yet Suter feels something isn't quite right: "I knew I didn't want to go in a psychological or spiritual direction. I had to take a step back, pause, to better understand what I was looking for." But once again, the crisis is an opportunity for a fresh start, and Suter returns to immerse herself in her world of photographs, seeking to refine her language so that the invisible thread that ties her compositions together becomes increasingly transparent to the viewer. But, ultimately, what kind of language is it? "It's similar to the language of dreams. It's fast, associative, and non-rational. I create unexpected connections between images to generate new meanings. I don't try to explain everything verbally, but to provoke a visual experience. A language that operates beyond words, touching something more fundamental in the human experience."

Nine years after the publication of Parallel Encyclopedia, in 2016, Batia presents Parallel Encyclopedia #2 . Same format, same method, same number of pages. But unlike many cinematic sequels, the second volume holds its own. The artist uses color sparingly. The layout is slightly more elaborate . There is perhaps more humor. But once again, the flow of thousands of images manages to embrace all of human knowledge, from the micro to the macroscopic, from the ancient to the contemporary. From this volume, as from the others that followed, particularly Radial Grammar from 2018, arise installations in which Suter brings images into dialogue with each other and their relationships with space. These can be blowups, slideshows, or projections. “Installations allow me to explore physical space, to walk among images. Here, the images almost become a 'skin' for the wall, interacting with the architecture.” Suter conceives these operations as "extractions" of one or more chapters from her books and are, ultimately, extensions of her editorial projects. While the experience of a book is intimate and repeatable, the experience of "placing it into space" becomes something physical, where the viewer confronts images larger than their own bodies, which they can observe from up close or from afar. The same thing happens in recent weeks in the darkened spaces of the Roman cryptoporticus in the historic center of Arles, where Suter was invited to exhibit "Octahydra" during the Rencontres de la Photographie. This work consists of projections that reflect, on the one hand, on architectural forms and, on the other, on images of food containers, in which the rhythmic and architectural patterns evoke structures of defense and protection.

Suter's language eludes immediate rationality, yet is universally comprehensible . Like music, after all. The images she collects, by a sort of ancestral call, are not mere representations, but words of a discourse that is understood almost unconsciously. As she herself admits, we live in a time when, inundated by a constant flow of visual stimuli, "reflection is almost impossible." And these images she uses, which come from the past—a past that comes to us from the printed page—perhaps appear as the last holds to avoid drifting, in a context where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish what is true from what is not.

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