Reflections of D.M. Terblanche

To hold quiet. The quiet of morning as it falls into one’s awareness. The quiet of the

kettle for company, the quiet of three rooms intertwined. It is no small glory.

I arrived by overnight train from Cologne in the early hours of the morning, settling

into the Ping Pong residency apartment that would be my home for the next two

weeks. Though brief by schedule, my time there opened a space in which to work

and reflect freely. It was my first residency, and to do so in the living city of Berlin felt

Wondrous.

The days filled with visits to jazz clubs and photographic galleries, with conversations

about photobooks, and with time spent reflecting on my project Grim, my career

trajectory, and my place within this narrative.

It was the first time I took medicine for the recently diagnosed Ehlers-Danlos, the

illness that has made my bones and muscles dance for years. From this position, I

met Graciela Iturbide’s birds, a recurring theme throughout her work, alongside

death. At C/O Berlin, her photographs, contact sheets, and reflections filled the

ground-floor exhibition hall. I was glad it was on the ground floor, for it carried such

depth, such soul-weight, that I was certain that had it been higher, it would have sunk

through the floors.

Combine looking at a photograph of Graciela Iturbide with her words in quotation:

“I use my bird sight to see the fragments. The camera as mirror as bird eye. And I

with my eyes to fly. Always mid-flight. I look to the skies. Birds like shifting stars and

all of them speaking to one another, telling different stories. Wings spread and

reverberate into silence. Everywhere there are signs of calls to higher powers. I raise

my ear to the sky and hope to hear a response. And I do. It is flocks of wings that fill

my body and guide me.”

Now take birds for bones and limbs that run into each other, busy highways, spasms

of existence. Now take Takashi Yoshimatsu’s Saxophone Concerto “Cyber Bird,” the

second movement, Bird in Grief. Combine them, and you have a church service for a

photographer confronting physicality, grasping for security.

This was then followed by tea, and a walk, and many photobooks in the

companionship of Misha Kominek. I met Misha during my first portfolio review in

Braga, Portugal in 2023, during the Encontros da Imagem Photography Festival,

where I was awarded the Emergentes Prize 2023. We met again later, and now

again. He showed me multiple photobooks, and we walked around and looked at

Trees.

This was a key point during the residency. It acted as a reminder of the process of

what goes into making a photobook, and of the camaraderie that comes with the

photographic process and those who so deeply understand it. I revisit this

conversation writing now. I revisit the trees. I open the pages of some of my favourite

photobooks in my head, where they rest like friends.

Throughout this, I worked through a wider selection of the images of Grim. Grim is

the project I have been working on for a year, a story told from the perspective of a

spine. I visited DM and had them printed small and many, before laying them out. It

was great to do so, to see them before me as such.

This combined with a visit to Fotografiska, where I saw multiple exhibitions, including

the long-admired work of Nikita Teryoshin, James Nachtwey’s Memoria, and the

exceptionally well-thought-out curation of Diana Markosian’s Father.

I would return to the apartment at 4 a.m. and 4 p.m. alike, gathered by city

experiences, tea with a photographer friend, and late nights understanding life itself,

wonderful and seedy. I took self-portraits framed by the constant thought that the

body in fright, in flight, is a spirit bird. My birthday came and went, and as a gift to

myself I picked up whipped cream, candles, and butterfly stickers for self-portraiture,

a photograph teeming with comforting wood, and a nice orange.

In that frame, and in this residency, I found a sound space. Rarely have I been given

this much freedom: to be in a basement room, to drift through city walls and halls, to

bloom in its ugly, welcoming beauty. This residency took care of me, in this small

intermission of my life. And Berlin, may it welcome me back as such again.