(capsules) Marta Djourina & Andréa Vamos

This year, you are both transforming a storefront at (capsules). Could you tell us what you are bringing into your windows?

Andréa: I am presenting Les trous dans l’histoire, a wallpaper assembled from some thirty postcards of spomeniks. These are memorial monuments built in socialist Yugoslavia, mostly from the 1960s to the 1980s, in memory of the Second World War and the antifascist struggle. In the original project, the monuments are erased, and the wallpaper stays white where they were. For Capsules, I decided to cut them out. Behind them hangs a page from my series Archives of Monuments, visible only through the openings.

How did you come across these postcards?

I have been working on spomeniks for three years, and they will be the subject of my thesis. I discovered these archives in a book, Jugoslavija danas. The postcards were made to circulate towards the other blocs. After its break with Stalin in 1948, Tito’s Yugoslavia sought a path of its own between the two, based on self-management. This self-management appears nowhere in the postcards. It comes from my research.

By cutting out the monuments, you remove the ideological centre of the images, yet the composition remains seductive, almost like advertising. Why does this persistence of desire interest you?

These images do seduce like advertising, but what seduces me is the idea of building a new society. The postcards are traces of a failed revolution, and often a revolution is born from another that failed. It is a form of optimism, a way of moving forward. An installation that builds and destroys at the same time is a proposal to reread a political system.

And what do we see through the holes?

In the first layer, the monuments are removed: what a society wanted to show of itself is pierced. In the second layer, they reappear, but differently. Archives of Monuments consists of large collages of photocopies taken from existing spomenik archives and mounted on Canson paper. By playing with light and contrast, I eviscerate the image. Only fragments remain, which I tear and crease to speak of the fragility of history and its potential manipulation. The monument is no longer the smooth image of the postcard, but a reconstituted, fragile image, reached only through the hole.


Marta, your installation is also built in layers. What are you presenting?

I am presenting States of Motion, a new installation centred on a large, unique photographic work made of three analogue pieces, each about 127 × 250 cm. The works are unique analogue exposures, produced directly on photosensitive paper, in complete darkness and without a camera. I move in front of the paper with lasers, self-built light tools and coloured filters. For Capsules, rather than presenting the three pieces as one flat image, I suspend them at different depths. The work comes apart and enters the architecture: its fragments overlap, disappear and realign as the passerby moves along the window.

You work in complete darkness. How do you know what you are making?

I orient myself through my body and memory, remembering where I have moved, where the light has already touched the surface and for how long. It is a bodily knowledge. Over fourteen years in the darkroom, I have developed what I like to call choreographies: movements with lights in my hands and on my body that turn into colour drawings on the paper. I sometimes call it blind painting. But unlike in painting, I don’t see the mark appear. The light produces a latent image that only becomes visible through chemical development. I find that delay fascinating. I find the gap between these two timelines interesting: the recorded trace only takes on a material appearance at a later point.

So the photograph records a trajectory rather than a representation.

Yes. I am not standing outside something and photographing it. My body becomes part of the photographic apparatus: it measures distance, directs light and determines duration. The photograph is not an image of my body, but evidence that a body has moved through that space. A trajectory tells us that someone has passed through without revealing who it was. The photograph becomes an archive of a performance that no longer exists. The body is gone; what remains is its trace.


Both of your installations treat the shop window not simply as a display surface, but as something that shapes how we see. How do you think about the window as a medium?

Andréa: The shop window exists to present and to attract. It activates desire and shows an ideal in which we can project ourselves. We even see our own reflection in it. I invert this function. I make the window opaque with the postcards and then cut out the monuments. These cut-outs are the only openings, and only through them does the gaze regain depth. Desire no longer lies in the object behind the glass, but in the void opened in the image.

And what do you think, Marta?

The window is never neutral. It frames what we see and separates inside from outside, but it also shifts constantly between transparency and reflection. You look through it while seeing yourself, other people and the city reflected back. This is very close to how I think about photography: a photograph is not a transparent window onto something either, it is produced through an apparatus. In States of Motion, the viewer can never occupy a completely external position. Their reflection enters the work, overlaps with the image and disappears again.


In both works, the gaze moves through openings and layers and never sees everything at once. What interests you in this kind of partial seeing?

Andréa: Whoever does not stop sees only a surface of postcards. Whoever is attentive asks, “What do I think I am seeing?”, spots a hole and has to step closer, lean in or rise on tiptoe. These openings invite us to go beyond what we are made to see. They prevent the quick consumption of the image and ask us to stay, to move, to come back.

Marta: Seeing is always partial. It depends on our position, movement, attention and memory, and I wanted to make this physical. From one position, certain fragments align; a few steps later, they separate or disappear behind another layer. There is no single position from which the viewer can possess the complete image. We increasingly expect images, and information in general, to be immediately available and legible. I am interested in an image that resists this. The viewer has to move and construct relationships between fragments, so seeing becomes an active process.

Absence plays an important role in both of your practices, whether in the cut-out monuments or in images that record traces rather than represent something. What can be made visible through what is missing?

Andréa: The hole is the disappearance of a world, not only the removal of a symbol: it is the utopia that no longer exists. Svetlana Boym distinguishes two kinds of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia, which would rebuild the image, and reflective nostalgia, which dwells on what is missing. I work from the second. Here, erasing is a visible act, not a motif.

Marta: In States of Motion, you never see my body. And yet the entire image has been determined by it: where I stood, the reach of my arm, where I hesitated and how long the light touched the paper. There is also a political question in this for me. We often associate visibility with recognition, as though something has to be seen and identified in order to be acknowledged as present. What kinds of presence remain when the subject itself is absent? And what might an image allow us to perceive precisely because it does not reveal everything?


The body of the passerby, in turn, is very present. How do you think about it?

Andréa: The passerby is not a seated spectator; they simply pass by. My installation does not force them into anything. If they do not lean in, they walk past. That is what separates my gesture from an imposed vision.

Marta: There are two bodies in States of Motion: mine and the viewer’s. My movement produces the image; their movement produces a particular way of seeing it. And a passerby has not necessarily decided to become an art audience. In a museum, you consciously cross a threshold. Here, the work enters someone’s everyday route, on their way home, to work or through the city. They can ignore it, catch it from the corner of their eye or stop in front of it. I like this lack of control.


Both installations change with daylight and with the street around them. How much do you plan for this, and how much do you leave open?

Andréa: I plan the overall composition of the wallpaper, and therefore the position of the cut-outs. I do not control the reflections or the light, which vary with the time of day and the street.

Marta: I think of the installation as setting conditions for something to happen rather than determining the experience. I carefully consider the distances between the layers, their scale and their relationship to light. But daylight, weather, traffic and the people outside are conditions I cannot, and don’t want to, fully control. There is a direct parallel with the darkroom, where chemistry, duration and my own movement also influence what appears. Someone passing in strong daylight might see a different work from someone passing late at night.


We are surrounded by an endless flow of images on screens. Do you see your work as a response to the way we look at images today?

Andréa: Today’s gaze is hurried, caught in the fast consumption of images. That is the constraint of the market. My installation asks for the opposite.

Marta: We encounter an enormous number of images, usually very quickly and through screens. I am interested in almost the opposite: an image that requires duration, physical presence and uncertainty. My works are unique analogue objects, the material residue of actual events. I don’t see this as a nostalgic opposition between analogue and digital. What interests me is the politics of attention. What happens when an image refuses immediacy, when you have to change your position, wait, or accept that part of it will remain inaccessible?


Marta, movement also shapes your own life. How does living between places find its way into your work?

Movement isn’t a subject I chose from the outside; it has become one of the conditions from which I work. I was born in Sofia, later moved to Germany, and my work has developed through different cities, languages, residencies and temporary working situations. For the video work Frame of Time, I made panoramic images with a self-built pinhole camera, first in Glasgow in 2015 and then in New York in 2023, rotating around my own axis, later animated into a flowing moving image. Repeating the process eight years later, I realised I wasn’t only recording two cities, but encountering two different versions of myself. That is perhaps where migration enters my work most strongly: not as something I represent, but as a condition of perception.


Luxembourg is also a city of constant movement. How does its context shape the way you think about your installations?

Marta: People cross borders, commute and change languages there every day. I don’t want to illustrate that literally, but it resonates with States of Motion. The work begins with my own trajectory, and in the window, the traces of my movement encounter the trajectories of other people. For several weeks, the installation becomes a fixed point within all these movements. I like this inversion: the photographic object remains still, but the image never does.

Andréa: I don’t know Luxembourg yet, neither its stakes nor its strengths and weaknesses, and that is precisely why I applied. I was very curious to discover a country I hear very little about, and its vision of art in the city. The project is conceived for a shop window, not for a specific place. So I am curious to see how the context will read it, and what it will make the work say that I did not plan.

Finally, what do you hope stays with viewers?

Marta: Perhaps an awareness that an image doesn’t need to depict a recognisable subject in order to record something real. My body has disappeared, but its trajectory remains. The viewer arrives, their reflection briefly enters the image, and then they disappear too. What I would like to remain is an awareness of presence as something temporary: that we continuously leave traces, even as we disappear from the places we move through.

Andréa: I hope one question stays with them: “What am I allowed to see?” That they have felt that an image can hide more than it shows, and that one sometimes has to lean in and come back. And perhaps also a curiosity about Yugoslavia and, more broadly, about war memorials: how a society chooses to remember, what it builds for that purpose, what remains of it, and why these traces still speak to us today.


Discover Marta Djourina's (capsule) | Andréa Vamos's (capsule)