Stephan Reusse, Cologne 2024

60 Minutes / Wolves

60 Minutes / Wolves describes a period of time.
Sixty minutes.
Within that time, a person sits on a stone bench. He leaves the place. His body heat remains for a while. Later, wolves appear.
These events follow one another.
But they do not belong to the same time.
For the person, the situation ends when he leaves. To our eyes, the place is empty afterward. The action seems to be over.
The images tell of another time.
Heat does not obey the instant of disappearance. It slowly detaches itself from the body, passes into its surroundings, and only gradually loses its intensity.
The body is gone.
Its warmth is not.
It is precisely this delay that interests me in the work.
Not the decisive moment, but the time that follows.
The world responds more slowly than the event.
The stone bench, the wall, the ground become carriers of a past touch.
It is as if, for a moment, they remember.
This creates a kind of time that is normally inaccessible to our eyes.
Then the wolves arrive.
With them, the work changes.
A wolf perceives a place differently from a human being. For a wolf, what we experience as an empty surface is not necessarily empty. Scents and tracks can still be present long after their source has disappeared.
What has already become the past for us can still be information for another perceiving being.
The person was here.
The wolf was not.
And yet the wolf can perceive something of that person’s presence.
This shift fascinates me.
Not because scent and heat are the same thing. Physically, they have nothing to do with one another.
But both have duration.
They do not end at the same moment as the event that produced them.
The wolves arrive at the place later. By following a scent, they connect themselves to an event that took place before they arrived.
The sixty minutes therefore do not simply move from a beginning to an end.
With the appearance of the wolves, time opens backward once more.
With them, the temporal arc of the work closes.
The past is not repeated—but for a moment, it becomes present again.

Wolves 2024   (thermogr. images.)

In this way, different times meet within 60 Minutes / Wolves.
The time of the human being.
The time of heat.
The time of the wolf.
And the time of the camera.
The thermal camera occupies a peculiar position within this constellation.
It does not simply observe something that we ourselves could see. It registers another property of the place. In doing so, it produces an image that is foreign to our everyday perception and yet refers to something real.
In a sense, the camera stands between the human being and the wolf.
Not because it perceives as an animal does.
But because it reminds us that human vision is only one possible way of experiencing a place.
The wolf reads scents.
The camera registers heat.
We look at an image.
None of these forms of perception possesses the whole place.
Each opens onto a different reality.
The sixty minutes, then, are not simply the duration of the work.
They are its material.
Only through this duration can these different temporalities meet at all.
The human being leaves.
The heat fades.
The wolves appear.
The camera registers.
And later, we see all of it simultaneously in an image.
That is one of the strange things about photography.
It can bring processes that occurred one after another into a single present.
In 60 Minutes / Wolves, then, I am less interested in the question of what remains.
What interests me is how long something can remain present after its source has already disappeared.
Sixty minutes is an exact measure of time.
And at the same time, it is a space in which different worlds touch one another for a moment.

S.R. 2024