Influences: Carlos Garaicoa / Lisa Openheim

Carlos Garaicoa

Nowhere is the constant march of history more obviously stamped on our surroundings than in cities, with the seemingly endless processes of demolition, reconstruction and rebuilding going on all around us. The cityscape of Liverpool, in particular, is currently changing so rapidly that even lifelong residents are bewildered. This makes it a perfect site for Carlos Garaicoa, whose art has long focused on the complex structures and ongoing evolutions of cities – the ways in which, although cities are constantly changing, they always retain, half-hidden, the traces of what went before. For International 06, Garaicoa makes intriguing use of his own photographs, ‘invading’ their surfaces to create poignant images of Liverpool buildings haunted by their own past.

Lisa Openheim

We tend to think of archives as impersonal collections of documents, but behind any archive there is a person (or many people), a purpose and an agenda. Lisa Oppenheim is fascinated by the human stories hidden within archives – the notes handwritten in the margins of historical documents, the scribbled descriptions on the backs of old photographs. She’s also fascinated by the many ways in which archives allow us to slip between past and present. For International 06, Oppenheim will make use of the archive of Liverpool photographer Edward Chambré Hardman, but with a twist, setting words alongside images and past alongside present to create a uniquely fluid portrait of the changed – and changing – city.