Godesses of Fate

Godesses of Fate:

In the greek mythology the godesses of Fate are three; Klotho weaves the thread of life, Lachesis meassures it, Atropos cuts it when time reaches its completion.
Lachesis turns towards the past, Atropos to the future, while Klotho guards the present,
where the past and the future are woven together in the symploke of time. It is at the edge of the moment that everything is settled.

Maybe there is such a descision contained in Staffan Redins photographic installation, allthough in a new manner: These modern godesses regards us in a both cool and challenging way, they call upon us to take over our own destiny, at the same time as they continue being silent and point back to the photographical and no longer mythological darkness from which they have appeared.

The Greek destiny´s symbolic dividing into three has here been splittered, in the same way as the present returns, is repeated and doubbled. What we meet is a forest of looks, a labyrinthic multiplicity of godesses, creating equally as many living statues.

In the poem Correspondences Baudelaire writes:

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L´homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l´observent avec des regards familiers.

Redin places himself beyond the high pretentions of baudelairian symbolism and there are no correspondances to a divine reality to read out of his work, just as little as we can be said to wander about in a symbolically intense nature as we move through his photographic world. But the substitutional drama of the gaze remains, where the one who´s observing and the one who´s observed perpetually are trading places, although this substitution now is taking place everywhere, in all directions.

In this reversity, in the modern labyrinth, where subject becomes object and reverse in a never ending process, the descisions of fate are made differentely: How can one be faithful to oneself facing the demands of these ”familiar glances”, yet empty, strange and unpersonal?
It´s like having to choose before there are any options, to obey the command ahead of its formulation. A multiple visual imperative, the law of the gaze before it has become identification and intimacy.

One can´t remain in such a situation, it constitutes a kind of bordersituation that one has to leave behind. Yet still, Kafka´s words apply absolutely: The Law is like a young girl, she receives you when you come and release you when you go.

Sven Olov Wallenstein  1991