In this future, glimpses of which shine through to us, yesterday was already tomorrow. Day is night and vice versa. The predicted catastrophe is already here. Frédéric D. Oberland’s Vestiges of the Future is a transdisciplinary expression—visual, textual, and auditory—of what is about to happen, of ruin and eternity. In contrast to this predictable scenario: come together, summon joy and metamorphosis. Play the game, even if it means finding yourself, so that at least something happens.
The images are taken from a long-term photographic (35mm) and film (Super8 photograms) corpus in which hallucinatory visions, mutant geographies, intimacies and embraces, uprisings and epiphanies of life interact. Beyond fragmented geographies and histories, the characters — humans, animals, plants — intersect, their semantic contamination tracing the outlines of an atlas without maps. Here, it is the hand that gropes, the hand that sees, while matter engulfs and spits out time. This richly written book borrows from film editing—ellipses, decomposition of movement, acceleration/deceleration. Several sequences collide between main sections, image inserts, and texts. Ten original texts punctuate the visual narrative and enlighten it. Vestiges of the Future takes the form of a polyphonic grimoire, a set of signs to be deciphered and rearranged: if all we had seen was what we were going to see.
