Unseen Forces

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In 2002, a French Catholic Priest named Father François Brune wrote that a machine called a Chronovisor was held deep in the shadowy collection of the Vatican. Along with millennia worth of plunder from every conceivable culture on Earth, he alleged that the church has in its possession a device capable of viewing the past. 

As described by Brune, the machine was built by an Italian scientist named Pellegrino Ernest and worked somewhat like a radio. It picked up and unscrambled ambient electromagnetic radiation emitted by events in the past, making them into a picture on a television screen. With the chronovisor, the inventor supposedly witnessed the crucifixion of Christ, along with many other events central to the Catholic worldview. 

Though the Chronovisor is widely regarded as a hoax, the desire for photographic traces of past events is a recognizable, even relatable lust.¹ Whether documentary, evidentiary, or poetic, the promise that we will be delivered from some states of unknowing or ceaseless speculation by photographs is a tenuous belief.

My reasons for taking a picture are rarely visible in the picture itself because I am so often attempting to connect with or highlight something that has long passed as well as some of the circumstances that sharpen its endurance. As I sit on the bank of Wascana creek and hold my hand over the lens of my phone camera, what I am attempting to image(ine) are the bison bones that used to accumulate at the water’s edge. The creek bares the misunderstood or anglicized remnant of the Cree name “oskana kâ-asastêki” which means “where the bones are piled”. This record of past lives is layered with the settlement of the plains, the forced starvation and displacement of so many Indigenous nations, the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the immigration of Europeans from across a vast and powerful content, global colonization projects, the Indian Act, the sixties scoop, the growth of the middle class, the growth of the elite class the gradual dwindling of the middle class and the elite class and the explosion of the global oligarch class. All of these things hold this space, this very mundane space where the dwindling middle class walk their dogs and ride their bikes, and read didactic material about Dutch elm’s disease, and look at dead fish, and graffiti, and dead trees, and walk on the paths, and touch the grass, and have public sex, and think about public sex, and look at the open sky, and think about red willow, and photograph the geese and the dogs and the sky and the creek and the birds.

Some days, the density of loss seems to be greater and my mind is more attuned to the thickness of spirits hanging in the air. Jacques Derrida described this heaviness as “hauntology,” noting the way that people and their ideas seem to be constantly re-emerging long after their physical body dies or their ideas seem to go out of fashion. In this idea, Derrida gestures to the permeability of boundaries made between the living and the dead.