The lecture seemed more academic than artist oriented, I wonder whether the name of the school, part of a university, played in his choice. He did not speak of his images as art production but rather as part of his research. It became apparent at the end when a student asked him about the technical specifics of his photographs. Using large format cameras in difficult lighting situations and tripod head for tracking the movement of the Earth is quite interesting and he spoke little of it. His ability to jump between disciplines is quite admirable and as he mentioned he can talk on and on besides the one hour of the lecture.
His lecture was about boundaries, the narrative and work presented examines the difference between real boundaries and mental boundaries. In a sense it has to do a lot with space and place. The imagined secret bases and the real image of them (with the goats and the shepherd). His findings, however, are not so shocking as documentaries, for instance Taxi to the Dark Side, loaded with content and revealing reveal more than his work. For this reason I think the emphasis of his work is on mental boundaries more than spaces and places. He tries to expose the mechanisms of these boundaries and what they are meant to do. A simple research of platoon patches reveals a whole attitude and a language of a reality not that different from everyday life (work-family-sleep-work...) but the very specific lexicon of this reality makes it different. Another device was the research of fake companies and identities related to the CIA.
Panglen's work in a sense shows the boundaries of democracy as he stopped the CIA project after the findings of abductions by the CIA. While he was praising the constitution of the USA, this threshold he did not pass exposed a real boundary rather than a mental one. I was really interested in hearing more about the kidnapping in Macedonia (2-3 hours away from where I used to live!). Panglen did not comment on the democratic aspects related to these actions of federal institutions abroad.
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