ROMANCE archive

2018

Video installation (Single channel with audio)

Red light behind projection surface

Variable dimensions / Loop 33’55”

In a series of works done in 2017 and 2018 about Hovland, Dias & Riedweg revisit the work of the North American photographer, artist and activist Charles Hovland (1954). Between 1980 and 2000, Hovland published every week an ad at the New Yorker newspaper The Village Voice, announcing his services as a photographer to document people’s sexual fantasies. As a result, he silently built up a collection of 3.000 35mm black and white film rolls and about 450.000 color slides, which revealed over 1.500 models for male nude magazines.

In their approach to Hovland’s work, Dias & Riedweg have made one single channel video “Waiting for a Model” that portrays the photographer in his studio, as well as two video-installations “Fantasy Archive” and “Romance Archive” and a series of photographs so called “Kaleidoscopics”. This group of works, entitled “Camera Contact”, investigates issues related to the popularisation of the digital image in detriment of analog photography and thereby materialize the profound change in the representation of sexuality and gender issues that takes place then. 

For Romance Archive Dias & Riedweg coupled a kaleidoscope to the lens of their camera to film Hovland's layouts of the porn maganizes, thus fragmenting the final image into uncontrolled reflections and unexpected geometries. The red lighting behind the projection screen reconstructs the atmosphere of an analog photography laboratory in the final installation, where the audio also built from “kaleidoscopic” fragments of hit songs from that period, allows for an association with the private universe of the New York photographer with the viewer's memories.