Through Katrien De Blauwer's collages and their short-circuit effect on our ways of seeing, the volume explores the notion of the void and of its visibility, in a work situated at the border of several disciplines, from picture-making to cinema, performance and painting.

A maker without a camera, she collects and re-uses pictures and supports taken from old magazines and papers, engaging them in a vision that occurs directly in the hand, and so becomes more physical and tactile. She gives new meaning and life to what is residual, saving those fragments from destruction and including them in a narration that combines intimacy and anonymity. Hers is a work about memory, never by accumulation but by subtraction: it calls to mind photomontage or film editing, using the cut as a border or a frame that determines what is visible and essential.

The book takes its inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni's sensitivity and, like the Italian director, whose interest always lies beside the event shown, it focuses on the unseen and off-screen elements of the collages — cut-out fragments, words from the artist's notebooks, the reverse side of the support papers — all belonging to the order of visualising the absent.

“Nothing. The spot is an empty passageway between two buildings, empty of everything but emptiness.” — Michelangelo Antonioni