*This essay was written during the summer, in what felt like a different pandemic.

“People in mourning tend to use euphemism,” writes Zadie Smith in her book of essays, Feel Free. “The most melancholy of all the euphemisms: ‘The new normal.’ It’s the new normal, I think, as a beloved pear tree, half drowned, loses its grip on the earth and falls over.” This vertiginous ‘falling over’ is perhaps all the more so in the midst of a pandemic that could not stop mass protests in the defence of Black livelihoods, and that could not still minimize the chance of major climate catastrophe. And the new normal bobs strangely on uncharted waters.

In Open Justice, an online exhibition first launched at the start of all this in March and which ran through July 18, the concept of normalcy—or its illusion—is also the axel upon which curator Ronald Rose-Antoinette considers six moving image works. “To unthink justice or how we habitually construe justice as a return to a default (i.e. violent) norm which, in fact, never took precedence is a difficult but necessary task,” he writes.

The work of an exhibition is referential: each work must relate to another, no matter how disparate they are in the subjects and emotions they consider. In Open Justice, reflexivity ripples through each work itself, whose elements are untied to the earth, like loose silt, or a tooth unsettled in the mouth. In ALTIPLANO, a meticulously arranged work of 35 mm film and sound design, topographies of the Chilean desert are overlaid upon each other in quick sequence, creating a disorienting arrangement of change. In Gosila, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, order attempts to be restored following a hurricane in a tender portrait of rural life and its remnants in Puerto Rico.

Open Justice considers normalcy in a different way than the kind we’re perhaps most inclined to discuss in this unusually long moment—the works deal with subject matters grounded in the earth, and around it are themes of environmental change, extraction, migration, the making and unmaking of history, biology. The exhibition considers, very explicitly, the notion of “catastrophe” in environmental terms. The six featured films were released on the cusp of the global restrictions brought on by COVID-19, and so the online format was perhaps incidental, and not a necessity. Yet, in the context of such a massive global shift in ways of doing and relating to each other, the works taken together do incur a layer of new meaning.

It is interesting, for instance, to consider the way the exhibition considers the archive, at the same time that it begins to shoulder some of the responsibility of digital archival. In Filipa César’s The Embassy, a hand lifts each page of a photo album to reveal the images taken by a Portuguese colonist, who wielded power over the West African country Guinea-Bissau. The film itself is an act of archival, resisting the documentary power of the original images to reveal a new counter-memory. The films taken as a whole in the exhibition seem to do more than what is on the screen, striving toward permanence in the estuaries of a temporary online exhibition.

The statement from the curator, Rose-Antoinette, puts this in perspective: “This exhibition aims to constitute a textu(r)al, durational and accessible documentation of a variety of practices nurtured by emerging and established filmmakers from around the world. Together these images offer a poetic twist on anticolonial aesthetics seeking to turn, over and over again, — underlining the complexity of the term “catastrophe”: a coming to an end anterior to all stasis — what is unjustly and dangerously figured as irreversible.”

I remember seeing Josef Sudek’s gelatin silver prints for the first time at the National Gallery in Ottawa, still an important place to me, for its expanse more so than any other feature. The large, oblong windows made for great viewing, and wondering, and made me feel safe in spite of the fact of windows: that they let light in just as they let light out. It was winter, and I walked the lit path home on a foggy evening.

Sudek’s photographs call to mind a stranger’s brush against your coat on the bus. His way of seeing reminds me of a framing I used to use, at my teacher’s encouragement, in ninth grade: “It can be seen that…” And his still life, of an egg, triggers the memory of my mother telling me how my grandfather, in a nursing home, gave my uncle and his wife a tea egg that he had saved from that morning.

Born on March 17 in 1896, Sudek is best known for his photographs of still lifes and interiors of Prague, many of which were taken from his studio. The image, “The Window of My Studio,” which can be viewed online at the New Orlean’s Museum of Art, recalls the fact that the German philsopher Immanuel Kant, born a century and a half earlier, never left the outskirts of his hometown of Königsberg. He enjoyed his solitary walk each day. “Rain or shine, it had to be taken. He went alone, for he wanted to breathe through his nose all the way, with his mouth closed, which he believed to be excellent for the body. The company of friends would have obliged him to open his mouth to speak.” writes John Merrick for Verso.

Sudek photographed everyday objects in different lights, on different days, at different angles, an example of which could be, “Untitled (pear on crooked plate),” or “Glasses and Eggs.” He believed in the way images could be transferred through diararistic ambition and a curiosity about the way light refracts. His is an intimate collection of publishable unpublishings, that deserve to be seen even if they were not meant to be. Other works, landscapes like Paesaggio, take a wider, panoramic and more global view of intimacy. They stay grounded in his point of view while taking on a stony silence that is estranged from the energy of his other works. In his still lifes, taking into consideration his quotidien subjects, Sudek’s photographs are varied and more experimental than they even appear at first glance. He deeply abides the interior monologues that exist to distinguish what is inside, between and outside the window, the fog that settles on it as if on the camera lens.