Self published, 2020. Edition of 185 copies.
Screen printed card folder, 282 x 382 mm, 96 pp., b/w and color illustrated throughout. Photographs, collage, painting and design by Oliver Pin-Fat.
Presented unbound (but folded) in large format as an unbroken stream of offset printed diptychs on heavy matte paper, IN)ABSENTIA comes in a small edition of 185 copies only and a special collectors edition of 15 copies. The book is housed in heavy card (black and/or pink) screen printed folders.
N)ABSENTIA in one of its many ‘senses’ relocates and reinterprets the past by pushing (or pulling) it almost violently, crudely, into the stained and templated derangement and haunted exile of the present. Photographed in Bangkok one night on one roll of film of solely one particular man in 1995, as a fragmentary part of the book’s introduction (and in way of context) Olivier Pin-Fat writes:
“[….]
This momento mori. This fallen man.
Breaking his form again to fit-in.
After photographing ‘crashed man’ I don’t remember anything else of that night. I shot 37 frames of him just outside the bar I’d been in. I processed that roll weeks if not months later, I forget exactly, but it would have been with a batch of other film so I could do them all in one intensive soup-session. I printed a contact sheet, put the negatives together with this in a brown envelope and unthinkingly labelled it ‘the fallen man-95’ without paying it much attention. I stored it somewhere and forgot about it for years, for decades. It was only in late 2019 I decided to print the entire roll unedited for the very first time in my darkroom, frame by solitary frame all in stark strange sequence. Frame 1 to 36 plus the extra one at the end of the roll. An ‘anti-edit’. An edit to have no edit. All inclusive. I’d been subliminally thinking about and looking at this contact sheet on and off for a few years & utilising the entire corroding & chemical stained 8” X 10” print on occasion as a singular integral piece for a few disembodied projects along with other works by me, for Brussels, Athens and so on, but never with a singular focus specifically on singular prints made from each and every singular frame of that one crashed man on that one weird and singularly crashed night. 25 years later. He was raw.”
