Find Footage

Utensils left behind on the sidewalk: they are an indispensable part of the street scene. A chair, lamp, table or cupboard; They were once carefully selected to furnish the interior, for embellishment and as an expression of individual identity. Now they have been selected for disposal – after purchasing a new variant or because people have grown tired of them.

Throwing it away, dumping it on the street, is an act in which the former owner consciously, yet unintentionally, creates new compositions. An act in which (re)placement is woven into a ritual. The result is a public tableau from and about ourselves. The items are sacrificed to the entropy of the street. A final tribute to what we once owned. Everyone can take, touch or destroy what was once ours.

The beauty of finding

Jeroen Arians is fascinated by the tipping point at which everyday reality becomes surreal. The Rotterdam photographer looks for everyday objects that have been left behind on the street. He then takes them to his workplace, where he brings the objects together in new compositions. The compositions are created based on research into material, color and shape, but also into the intrinsic functionality. Once the old objects are brought together into a new composition, they take on a new meaning. They can no longer exist without each other, despite their fragile relationship with each other.

Position determination

For Arians, the process does not stop with a new composition. As soon as the objects within the composition of a new installation have taken on a different meaning, Arians places the installation back where he found the items. He selects the environment that most naturally suits the new installation. As if it had always been there.

It will become a monument to our consumer society, which can collapse at any moment. The space becomes a setting for an initially formal composition, which takes a theatrical turn in the final phase of its life. Arians emphasizes this intrinsic tension with theatrical lighting, which further emphasizes the drama of the image in its surroundings.

The title 'Find Footage' refers to the cinematographic technique found footage. It is pseudo-documentary and mockumentary, but in reverse order. The found objects, which Arians has explicitly been looking for, are depicted in a cinematographic setting. The installation is determined by what people put on the street, but is ultimately returned to the street.