Johan Zwergius

Tod und Verklärung is an book-based project that dives into the layers and aesthetics of creation and destruction through the interactive format of the book medium. The included material comes from a variety of public and private collections that deals with printing and sculpting and is interspersed with an assortment of modern and historic imagery – sourced in part from the internet – of persons of influence, objects, inventions, and personal spaces that connect via a loose game of association.

By working with an alternative analogue process called laptopgrams, a technique that creates through a digital to analogue interface trough the physical contact between a phone screen and a photographic paper, and the book format, a cycle forms – digital to analogue, analogue to digital. This echoes the proverbial ouroboros of birth and death. Via these premises and the inherent notions of transfiguration that an object like a death mask, paintbrush or furnace holds, the book is a testament to the apparatuses that can facilitate societal and technological change through different means – be it rhetoric, mechanical innovation, or simply a space where you let your own thoughts grow – from the obvious, to the deeply personal and beyond.