images by Grégoire Devoucoux - words by Jule Kurbjeweit

If you look just a little closer, you might almost touch it.

Used to encountering so-called nature as an image – often aesthetically pleasing, desirable, perhaps fetishised – we keep it at a distance. The idea of getting really close, close enough to touch, can be both alluring and repelling. Because intimacy entangles. Real intimacy means being changed by what you encounter.

microcosmologies is a study in what Andreas Weber calls "the fundamental erotics of being touched by the world, and of touching it in return, as a life-bestowing power" – the erotics of shared, felt aliveness. It is about getting close enough that a surface becomes a textured landscape and fragility becomes visible: the imperfect, tactile physicality of living things, their vulnerability and their insistence on existing.

They seem to invite you to touch, and be touched, without plucking or gripping.

Analogue film, too, is a body, in contact with the world. Light stains it. Time leaves its mark on the emulsion the way weather marks skin. Film is altered in the way that any real encounter changes a body. The image, then, is a body that has been touched.