Blisters in the Sun 

(1998)

A photo project, series of photographic prints which were altered with household bleach and then enlarged to 30″ x 45″. The installation version used small red light emitting diodes (LEDs) as only the light source. A text, the disasterdelicate (below), by Kim Dawn was commissioned to accompany the exhibition.

Presentation History
– 2007 Montréal (publication, Tue, Le Quartanier)(a selection of 10 images from the series, reproduced in B&W)
– 2001 Montréal (installation, Casa del Popolo) (shown without the array of LED lights)
– 1998 London, Ontario (installation, Forest City Gallery, May 29-July 4)
– 1998 Halifax (installation, Eye Level Gallery, Jan 13-Feb 7)

 

the disasterdelicate – Christof Migone’s Blisters in the Sun
by kim dawn

the day is marked, the moment stilled. distilled: explosion.
the ‘place’ is a domestic one, repetition of the couch, the wallpaper, the window, the fridge and the cereal scorched bowls. these signs play
background to the intimate
everyday holocaust spilled.

this is no longer an ordinary day.
burning,
through the manipulation and magnification of the photos.
he has plagued these bodies with
disasterdelicate burning.

he has lovingly given these bodies a disease.

through the precise burning he tried to re enter/discover. the burning is a tactile intervention into memory. memory is never lost. nothing is
ever forgotten.<1>

he tries to get back in, to larvae relive, the photo album burns,
silent.
he (re)enters memory/excavation under. he dives under upon the surface.
the photographs in relation iridescent to the card characters in
alice’s trip through the looking glass. they are surface. the surface is
depth to go
‘in’ the surface is to go around.<2> glowing. [the burnt limbs the
lit innards]

fervency.

the individuals are closed off.
only their bodies remember
these moments.
there are only ever bodies present/absent.
the body and the camera meet in a
fraction of a burning distillation.

voices stay long after words spoken.

through the burning=cleansing of the photographs the inner suffering is magnified upon the surface.

skin with no but to suffer.
suffer (in) stillness, <3>
there is never stillness. trembling frozen. <4>
(my your skin comes undone.)
(i forget today) (togentlyscour
(i your face has faded and i, i)
( burnt. (desire) nothingness)

_____________________________
1. suffering : it means not so much what we undergo, as that which goes under. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing Of The Disaster,
trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
2. …its outer surface is continuous with its inner surface: it envelops the entire world, and makes that which is inside be on the
outside and vice versa… by skirting the surface, or the border, that one passes to the other side. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic Of Sense.
Trans. Mark Lester. Columbia University Press, New York, 1990.
3. yes, my mouth, but there it is, i won’t open it, i have no mouth, and what about it, i’ll grow one, a little hole at first, then wider and wider,
deeper and deeper,the air will gush into me, and out a second later, howling. Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable. trans. Samuel Beckett &
Patrick Bowles. Grove Press, New York, 1958.
4. the bridge where one feels like plunging one’s finger into the water, in a gesture of violent regression to a state of childhood… Antonin
Artaud, Artaud Anthology, ed. Jack Hirschman, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1965.