Berlin - Golden Moldies

It seems all the artworks I like have a few things in common: death, decay, and the never-ending enigma of transience. I know, I’m deep like that. But think about it--the Acropolis, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and a couple other masterpieces of humanity have all been blessed with this final touch of rot that made them so very special. Same thing goes for work by Rene Schäffers, the artist from Halle who lets his pictures “go bad.”

Vice: Who are you?
Rene Schäffers: I used to be a construction mechanic who attended evening school to get into university. Then I worked as a waiter for the army only to become a photographer at the Burg Giebichenstein School of Arts and Design after that. Since then I’ve had multiple exhibitions and projects of my own.

Why do you let your pictures mold? Are you also bad at cleaning out the refrigerator?
Well, first of all it’s not the pictures I’m letting go bad, it’s the slides. It all started in 2003, when I took my old crappy bike home after the gym. The police stopped me and they let me go home, but I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike home. So I was walking along the road and that’s how I stumbled across this odd black plastic box full of old slides that someone had thrown away. I developed them and was totally intrigued by the results. That’s how I started experimenting and putting slides into this box so they’d get moldy too. So all of your pictures were born from this magic box?
Mostly, yeah. For a couple of bigger projects I grew mold in petri dishes, but that didn’t work out so well. The prints didn’t look the same as the ones from the box any more. They were not as vivid.

Your pictures are prints from the slides, but the slides actually continue to mold. So basically each print is only a snapshot of a moving image, right?
Yes. Sometimes I would develop different stadiums of one and the same slide. If you have a close look at them, you can see structures similar to maps in the enlarged structures—similar to the structures subdued by mankind. I tried to act like God to achieve certain results and realized that clear shapes yield the best results.

But don’t you think that randomness is a factor that makes your pictures special?
I don’t believe in the concept of randomness—sure, I start something and see what happens. However, my method still contains unpredictability—which reduces the impact of the artist. It never gets boring because you can never know how the pictures are going to look like when they’re finally “done.”

(Artwork by Rene Schäffer)