Ant Football

Ant Football tells a story about synchronicity: fate, chance and meaningful coincidences.

Ant Football tells a story about synchronicity: fate, chance and meaningful coincidences. Based on a series of events that occurred on holiday with my boyfriend in Budapest, Hungary, it all started with a roll of film I found in an antique shop.

The work is made with images from my own archive, holiday snapshots and collages created with photographs from the found roll of film, which seems to date back to the 50’s or 60’s.

The anonymous photographer had mostly been busy documenting what was on TV. Besides a few pictures of what seem to be the photographer's friends, every other frame shows a TV screen broadcasting an old fashioned talk show. The day after I bought the film we got hit by a car when crossing the road.

My camera actually took the biggest hit when the vehicle drove into us from behind. The weight of my Minolta XE-1 made from solid metal was mostly responsible for the impact which shattered the windscreen. You could say photography literally saved my life. Somehow there was not a single scratch on my camera or lens. Even more bizarre, my boyfriend’s cat got hit by a car that same day. Unfortunately he did not live on to tell the tale.

Looking back, I was struck by the coincidence that after the accident all I could do was rest my injured body in my hotel bed and watch TV, completely unaware of the TV pictures inside the film canister I now had in my possession. All I could watch were Hungarian spoken programmes, so everything and everyone on the screen remained a mystery, just like the photographer who took the TV pictures I had found, and the people on his or her TV screen.

In the collages, noise and pixelation is created to distort and obscure the photographer’s sitters and the TV subjects’ identities. The static display resembles the visible interference that appears when a TV cannot receive a transmission signal, ultimately symbolising my relationship with the found photographs and my experience of watching foreign TV. Like a TV that has no signal, I have no idea who these people are and what message is being communicated.

TV noise is most commonly seen as fast-flickering “dots”, “snow” or “bugs”. In Hungarian it is called hangyafoci, meaning “ant football”.