Fotoreproductie van een schildering, voorstellende de toegangspoort van Herstmonceux Castle before 1876

Curator: This photogravure captures Herstmonceux Castle's gatehouse sometime before 1876. Look at how light falls across the aged stone. Editor: It has a hauntingly beautiful feel. I see how the creepers and weathered walls blur the lines between nature and artifice. Curator: Absolutely. Castles, in general, act as vessels of history and collective memory. Consider the symbolic weight of the archway as a portal, a threshold… Editor: A gateway constructed through labor, of course. The specific materiality here –stone hewn and placed by workers whose names we likely don’t know–speaks to the means of production inherent in creating these monuments. It isn’t just stone, it's human toil made manifest. Curator: That labor gave rise to the symbolism though, didn’t it? Fortification meant security; height suggests dominance. Every architectural choice reinforced a power dynamic. And the vegetation growing on the structure makes it seem almost reclaimed by time, nature…a sort of melancholic reflection on vanished power. Editor: Melancholy, perhaps. I’m more struck by the consumption cycle visible even here: building, inhabitation, abandonment, decay, and, if we consider it, photography – yet another form of consuming the castle, freezing it, circulating it. Curator: The medium then amplifies this reflection. This is a reproduction of an artwork, which may also be a rendering, that presents the Castle that recalls the building as sign. Each photograph further extracts a ghost. Editor: Leaving only us, for the moment, looking at stone and its echoes. Food for thought indeed!