Text: Stephan Reusse, Köln, April 2024

60 Minutes / Wolves

Perhaps I am searching for the image precisely at this point—where presence begins to become a trace.

This thought has accompanied my work for many years.
I am interested in the image not as a depiction of an event, but as the moment in which the event begins to become a memory, a trace, or a perception.
60 Minutes / Wolves describes a period of time.
Not the duration of an action, but the time during which presence slowly transforms into a trace. The sixty minutes encompass the entire course of the work: a person’s presence, their disappearance, the lingering of their warmth, and finally the appearance of the wolves. It is not individual events that stand side by side, but different temporalities that overlap.

A person sits on a stone bench and leaves the place.
To our eyes, everything seems to be over.
And yet something remains.
Not as a memory in the psychological sense, but as a faint physical presence. Heat does not disappear the very moment a body leaves a place. It slowly detaches from the body and diffuses into the space. For a brief moment, the place still bears the trace of what has already passed.
Perhaps the image begins precisely there.
Not with the person.
But with their disappearance.
I am interested in this transition.
Not the moment the event occurs, but the time it takes for the world to respond to it.
Not the moment the event occurs, but the time it takes for the world to respond to it.

The wall becomes a sensitive surface. It stores nothing, and yet, for a brief moment, it preserves something that usually escapes our gaze. It is as if the space itself were still hesitating to release that presence once more.
The wolves appear within this interval.
They do not take the place of the human.
Perhaps they are merely reading what remains of him.

The human has left the place. For him, the event ends at this moment.

For the wolf, it may only just be beginning.

He moves through a landscape of scents, tracks, and other barely perceptible traces. What has already become the past for us is still the present for him.

Perhaps the wolves are not in the picture because they appear. Perhaps they are in the picture because they perceive the place in a way that alters our own perspective.
As I looked at these images, I wondered if the thermal imaging camera doesn’t do something similar.
It, too, does not follow what is visible. It does not register surfaces. It makes a temporal remnant tangible—a presence that is already disappearing and yet still exists.
There is no physical connection between scent and heat.
But perhaps both possess a similar temporality.
Both preserve, for a limited time, the presence of what is already gone.
Perhaps that is why the images describe not so much an encounter between a human and a wolf as two different ways of interpreting a place.

One leaves traces without being aware of them.
The other finds them without having seen their origin.
The camera stands between them.
Not as an observer.
Perhaps rather as another organ of perception.
It does not see in our place.
It makes visible something that usually remains hidden from our eyes.
For centuries, our culture has relied on sight. Visibility is considered a prerequisite for knowledge. Perhaps in doing so, we forget that every form of perception opens up its own world.

Thermography does not simply expand our vision.
It invites us to think more deeply about the concept of perception.
The large-format images therefore appear less like photographs and more like fields of color. The wall loses its architectural function. It becomes a membrane on which time becomes visible for a brief moment.
Perhaps every place preserves something of what has taken place within it.
Most of these traces remain invisible to us.
Not because they do not exist.
But because we usually do not perceive them.
60 Minutes / Wolves perhaps attempts to give these hidden layers a form for a brief moment.