The night dissolved in matter and antimatter
a review by Larisa Oancea
Tiane Doan na Champassak, Olivier Pin-Fat, Thomas Vandenberghe, Laura Rodari, Daisuke Yokota, Hiroshi Takizawa
A well-known anthology entitled “Anthropology of the Night” revealed, in the early 2000s, a shattering theoretical and methodological gap in what regards the nocturnal studies. But its visual response was yet to come. In January 2016, Tiane Doan na Champassak, Olivier Pin-Fat, Thomas Vandenberghe, Laura Rodari, Daisuke Yokota, Hiroshi Takizawa and publisher Alex Bocchetto met in Bangkok to collaborate towards a collective photobook. One month of shooting, one year in the making, 3AM is a nocturnal experimental project, a psychedelic experience brought to light by the long-term collaboration between AKINA and AM Projects.
At 3AM the night dissolves in matters and antimatters. Different textures – concrete, red lace trims, cracks and curtains, marble and walls – are melting from a page to another and give rhythmicity to the whole, liquefying the narrative bindings between the six photographers. The bounds between their languages are ambiguous as the word game (a sort of cadavre exquis) they outlined when asked to define how 3am looks like: translucent, vicious, still, ambivalent, stuck, sink. The book simultaneously offers an image of a Bangkok night – crowded night markets, concrete bridges, hotel rooms, lobbies and halls – and a dream image – an oneiric, almost sensorial aura which turns bodies into ghosts.
Tiane Doan na Champassak, Olivier Pin-Fat, Thomas Vandenberghe, Laura Rodari, Daisuke Yokota and Hiroshi Takizawa share an affinity not only for articulating brilliantly a soft erotic odyssey, privileging the fragment rather than the whole, but also for pushing the limits between abstraction and figuration by manipulating the materiality of the photograph. It’s a sort of alchemic process. Maybe it is not by chance that 3AM is commonly known as the “witching hour”.
