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{"id":269894,"date":"2025-08-27T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/chronique\/tete-a-tete-avec-michael-flomen\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T11:06:01","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T16:06:01","slug":"tete-a-tete-avec-michael-flomen","status":"publish","type":"chronique","link":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/columns\/tete-a-tete-avec-michael-flomen\/","title":{"rendered":"T\u00eate \u00e0 t\u00eate with Michael Flomen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
I remember that the first time I went to his studio was like stepping through the door of a fairy tale. Sixteen years have passed since then, yet this moment has remained imprinted in my memory. I can see myself walking, passing like Alice to the other side of the looking-glass, among his half-covered works, piles of negatives, tools whose usage escaped me. Microscopes, bits of organic matter, vats, and magic potions: everything seemed chaotic and meticulously organized all at once, waiting for a revelation.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
This is the space in which Michael Flomen takes a radical approach to photography, exploring the possibilities of the photogram, an image created through a camera-less process, without using lenses or focusing, by placing objects directly on a photosensitive surface and exposing it to light. Phenomena invisible to the naked eye (flows, vibrations, minute memories) are inscribed in the material. In a world saturated by pixels, Flomen brings us back to a fundamental definition of his medium: not to represent objects but to receive presences. The photogram is an art of the interstice, an inframince language\u2014in the Duchampian sense\u2014that traces pathways among nature\u2019s kingdoms and makes perceptible that which is usually beyond our reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By taking my first steps into this landscape of experimentation, listening to Flomen speak, and observing some of his works, I felt something decisive take form in me. I had just reached adulthood, and this moment was already shaping a way of situating myself in art, as well as a way of living in the world. It was an invitation to immerse myself in the grey zones, allow myself to be traversed, altered, contaminated by what decomposes and therefore transforms. In other words, this encounter felt like a coming-of-age story\u2014one that is still unfolding, and which I would like to recount here. This text can be read like a crossing, guided by different sensory thresholds. Different figures for different conditions of attention: the night, the universe, the acid, the firefly, the ocean, and the Emerald Tablet<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\"Michael
Michael Flomen<\/strong>
Rip Tide<\/em>, 2014. 
Photo: courtesy of the artist, collection Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Although I first immersed myself in Flomen\u2019s practice by discovering his studio, it would be difficult to reduce his practice to that space. As he likes to say, his real darkroom is the night. Most of his adventures take place under its veil. Guided by the moon, he roams over marshland and through shadowy undergrowth, tuned to the wind, imagining predators at the slightest noise yet most often encountering only some friendly mice. His laboratory is nomadic. Equipped with silver photographic paper, negatives, or glass plates coated in emulsion, he wanders with the humility of a watcher. He is ready to let the photosensitive surfaces be permeated by the surrounding murmur. He plunges the chosen support in water, places it on sand, stretches it over snow. He collects the runoff of rain, the sediments of a river, the sweeping brushstrokes of grasses. Each image is the result of many points of contact between an environment, a surface, a gesture, instantly captured by a flash or a phosphorescent burst of fireflies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Even after a significant career challenging the limits of his terrain, Flomen tells me that he still looks for the freshness of a first step by letting go. When he exposes the paper to light, he surrenders to the unpredictable.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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His entire body is caught in the current of chance encounters. This ritual eradicates the boundaries between him and his environment. Transcending the tool, he transforms the process itself into one. In his experiments, I also see a way of always making himself more vulnerable by allowing himself to be surprised by the mysteries of the technique and the outdoors. He welcomes anything that resists control and accompanies a substance in the process of becoming. His quest consists not in mapping reality but in calling on spirits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\"Michael
Michael Flomen<\/strong>
Acid Rain<\/em>, 2015. 
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Once the night is over, Flomen gathers his proofs and returns to his studio. There, he observes the marks left by the process begun in nature. Like invisible pollutants, spores have triggered reactions that alter the layers. Contours fluctuate and partially disintegrate. They become echoes of an unstable time. The idea is not to restore something but to allow it to happen. This turns the chemical degradation into an aesthetic force, revealing a language of mutating life in the eroding matter. The photograms stimulate the senses and re-anchor our gaze in the work\u2019s materiality. The energy of the bodies involved\u2014those of the artist and the environments traversed\u2014gets imprinted into the actual pulp of the paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the past several years, he has even gone so far as to fold the paper, breaking away from conventions in order to thwart the two-dimensionality and codes of the traditional photographic support. Already bearing the scars of an ecosystem under pressure, the prints are creased and sometimes torn to better sculpt volumes, flaws, ruins. The works Rip Tide<\/em> (2014), Moonrise<\/em> (2015), and Paradise Lost<\/em> (2016) create the illusion of craters and other ridge lines, impressions of fossilized skin, scars, and shadows. Altogether, the work illustrates an aesthetic of disaster or the theory of a crumpled universe, founded on the existence of cosmic mirages. The folding gesture may seem modest, yet it unfolds galaxies. It reminds us that neither the image nor Earth is flat, and that myriad histories reverberate in both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These works eschew immediate readability and are not intended to be deciphered. I would describe them as surfaces to be \u201cfrequented.\u201d The eye drifts between the lines and the marks while the mind is guided by evocative titles. Sometimes, only some blotting paper stands between reverie and rave. A dance of pareidolia unfolds. We watch a psychedelic dawn. Blast<\/em> (2017). We trip out on the rhythms of rock music titles. Riders on the Storm<\/em> (2018). We see headlights glowing in dark jungles. Pulse<\/em> (2001). We smell burning seeds. Fire in the Sky<\/em> (2019). We hear acid rain on the soil. Dazed and Confused<\/em> (2018). <\/em>In Trop Tard<\/em> (2019), the emulsion burns the paper. The work roars. Black holes pierce acid clouds. The vague impression of an ocean gasping for air and anger bleeding on corals. Brightly coloured whirlwinds ripping clouds apart. From the Web<\/em> (2016). Spider webs becoming astral architectures. Site<\/em> (2004). Ballet of waves and air bubbles. Of mineral particles and comet dust. An alien impulse or a dream of subterranean depths?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\"Michael
Michael Flomen<\/strong>
Trop Tard<\/em>, 2019. 
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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While some images are ablaze, others barely flicker. A sustained pulse follows an explosion. For several years, Flomen collaborated with fireflies. In the series Higher Ground<\/em> (2001\u2013present), their photocytes trace ephemeral constellations, subtle yet persistent signs of life in the ruins of the present. This work instantly evokes \u201cThe Disappearance of the Fireflies,\u201d an article written by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975, in which he turned his despairing realization of these winged watchers\u2019 disappearance into a metaphor for the extinction of a dissident popular imagination, suppressed by the violence of power. Years later, philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman refuted this observation in Survival of the Fireflies <\/em>(2018), demonstrating the persistence of \u201cfirefly-images\u201d in which the attentive viewer can discern unexpected resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the context of the current ecological crisis, Flomen\u2019s literal appeal to these insects asks us to forge alliances between species in the hope of healing a depleted planet. This is in line with the sympoiesis theorized by Donna Haraway, the co-creation between the living and the non-living, the fragile interconnected relationships that choose to \u201cstay with the trouble\u201d rather than to escape it (Staying with the Trouble, <\/em>2016). This art also makes us dream of bringing together contexts that remain unknown to each other. Where we could, for example, learn about rhizomatic cells and mycelial strands in Organelle<\/em> (2016), Big Sur<\/em> (2012), or Coming<\/em> (2012).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The photogram acts as a portal to other perceptions. Through its capacity to bring to the surface the secret harmonics of life, it resonates with a much older current of thought: that of the Emerald Tablet<\/em>. A foundational text of the alchemical tradition attributed to the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus, the Emerald Tablet<\/em> states a law of correspondence and unity: \u201cTrue it is, without falsehood, certain and most true. That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above, to accomplish miracles of one thing.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - \u201cThe Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus,\u201d Cabinet, June 2018, https:\/\/www.cabinet.ox.ac.uk\/emerald-tablet-hermes-trismegistus.<\/span> This principle is based on the idea of a vibrational coherence of the cosmos, a shared framework in which the kingdoms are not classified according to a scale of values, but instead are intertwined in a dynamic of transformation. Body and star, insect and galaxy, microbe and angel, silt and light all share the same breath and vibrate in unison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\"Michael
Photo: Alain Beauchesne<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Here, we are dealing not with a reversed dualism or some esoteric symbolism that needs deciphering but with the concept of a relationship in which each phenomenon manifests a part of the Whole, in which each apparition is perceived as the momentary expression of a temporary state in an ongoing process. This is the thinking, which tries to capture what is circulating between the different identities and forces present, that the Emerald Tablet<\/em> puts in play and that Flomen, navigating in his own way between the kingdoms, reactivates in the field of photography, as if an underground structure of the artistic gesture makes his practice into a scene of transmutation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Flomen\u2019s most recent series, Montauk<\/em> (2025), makes visible a situated form of this relational thinking. The village has generated an important artistic heritage (Pollock, De Kooning, Krasner), Indigenous stories, and paranormal theories. Yet beyond the inspiration drawn from this cultural and spectral material, the work arose from mourning a close friend and from a profound desire to see the ocean again, a matrix space that Flomen considers to be the origin of all life. He goes to the ocean with his glass plates, which he exposes to the waves. The water leaves its marks on them, but also its chemical effects. The image is both sculpted and gnawed by the world. Flomen accepts it without fighting against it. He lets the plates get oxidized. He scans the residue. Once again, he composes with whatever drifts, overflows, escapes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\"Michael
Michael Flomen<\/strong>
Montauk<\/em>, 2025. 
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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His works represent a fluid survival of affective, ecological, and technological events. Flomen embodies what ecofeminist philosopher Astrida Neimanis describes as thinking and feeling like a body of water (Bodies of Water<\/em>, 2017), an ontological and political condition that emphasizes our interdependence on all forms of life, since water is an element linking us to them. This practice has the potential to unfold like a somatic and cosmological ritual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a way, making photographs in Montauk means remembering the ocean that forms us and allowing this elemental memory to drown the reference points of our reality. Water keeps a trace of what came before us and will carry this echo long after our flesh has disappeared. In the face of this, Flomen is clearly humble: in the glacial ocean, at night, in the wind, he says he feels miniscule and fragile. This feeling translates a way of being situated as a species among others, of reconnecting to the intelligence of currents, to the shifting tides, to invisible lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From the firefly to the wave, from the light-sensitive plate to the Emerald Tablet<\/em>, I have gone on this journey with Flomen not out of a desire to retain some kind of truth but out of a readiness to listen: a way to linger on aspects that unsettle our knowledge and compose emergent spaces that change our attention. In a landscape inundated with signs and narratives that assign and constrain, making images in other ways\u2014between impression and abstraction, between photography and painting, between the invisible and the living\u2014is a subtle form of resistance. A thinking with no authority, open to ambivalence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I often return to these images in order to cultivate an allegiance to the unknown. To keep learning how to see. To become, perhaps, a bit more like a firefly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":269882,"template":"","categories":[887],"numeros":[7549],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[7557],"artistes":[7591],"thematiques":[],"type_chronique":[511],"class_list":["post-269894","chronique","type-chronique","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-column","numeros-115-decay","auteurs-manon-klein-en","artistes-michael-flomen-en","type_chronique-tete-a-tete-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chronique\/269894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chronique"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chronique"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269894"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=269894"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=269894"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=269894"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=269894"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=269894"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=269894"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=269894"},{"taxonomy":"type_chronique","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_chronique?post=269894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}