Oddments by Luca Bani and Gael del Río

What discourse emerges from the remnants of discourse?

Oddments is an involuntary photographic project. It reflects on the remnants of discourse, the excess of processes that unfold in the darkroom, and the things forgotten—like hurried notes in a visual notebook. It explores how photographic scraps (proofs often dismissed as merely procedural) contain spontaneous decisions that reveal subconscious participation, a latent intent. Thus, the project begins with Gael del Río and Luca Bani recognizing that every image holds involuntary narratives, initially unknown even to them.

The secrets of each scene gradually unfold with every act of manipulating the image. At the enlarger, they create test strips from a negative: this involves reframing. They take notes on these strips: this resignifies them. They save them without any explicit purpose: this consigns them to oblivion. The strips pile up, unordered, in a bag: this fosters an inaudible dialogue between them. At this point, they escape the artists’ hands and intentions. Time plays its role.

One day, the plastic of the bag has aged. Inside, the images have acquired a different meaning—through accumulation, coexistence, and combination. They reveal an unsettling sense of unity despite emerging from the perspectives of two people, different places, moments, and projects. Oddments, in essence, comes into being when these fragments are retrieved, unearthed, and call upon the artists to build a story from the pieces. They are compelled to create something akin to a new body—one made of parts belonging to different subjects—out of the seemingly dysfunctional, like a puzzle with pieces of varying sizes. Architectures, bodies, objects, and landscapes no longer sustain themselves; they are tenuous, severed from their original nature. A shift in scale has homogenized and unified them: a fold becomes a seam, a chest a dune, skin a chasm, a curve a meander. The prosaic becomes sublime… and vice versa: the unreachable peaks of a snow-covered summit, a rock crowned with guano.

These test papers were born to remain incomplete, asymmetrical like odd numbers (“odds”); but at some point, they became whole through their encounter with others—different, foreign—their counterparts. This has a human corollary: Oddments is the result of the convergence of two people, two gazes that seem to complement each other until they become indistinguishable. Oddments are remnants, scraps, castoffs that take on a greater substance. They are the impedimenta that accompany Gael del Río and Luca Bani when they decide to rescue these papers from the trash and turn them into a reflection on their practice as photographers. They surrender to what happens beyond their reach.