As part of the 7L's Correspondances program, Katrien de Blauwer explored the collection of books and magazines of Karl Lagerfeld's library at 7L, and reinterpreted it through a new series of photomontages in which the images serve as both a reference and a mirror.
Katrien de Blauwer turned to the photography magazines of the 7L library as both source and mirror. Drawn to a particular period—the late 1920s and into the 1930s—she found herself moving through frozen images of people mid- transformation : bodies compressed into legibility by the camera, lives fixed onto paper. Working though a Woolfian lens, she made a series of work that borrows these figures to tell a story that is, as usual, personal. The title of the installation comes from a single line taken from Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931): "Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball."
Six paper balls—one for each of Virginia Woolf's six characters—are installed in the space. Around them, on the walls, the twenty-nine photomontages unfold, tracing the same arcas the novel itself, a single day, from sunrise to sunset.
Katrien de Blauwer (born in 1969 in Belgium) is often described as a photographer without a camera. She constructs intimate narratives by meticulously cutting out and reassembling found images, sourced mainly from vintage magazines. Her work sits at the intersection of photography, photomontage and personal memoirs—always autobiographical, even when the images belong to someone else.
