Blinked Myself Awake

Blinked Myself Awake – In recent years, Bieke Depoorter has been meeting amateur astronomers, visiting state-of-the-art observatories and researching the history of astronomy. Having never been particularly interested in this field, she gradually realised that her new obsession was linked to childhood memories lost as a result of trauma. The night sky is, after all, a kind of shared memory: the light from celestial bodies can take hundreds or thousands of light years to reach our eyes on Earth. Some observable stars may have disappeared long ago. Depoorter was reluctant to observe the stars herself, but was attracted by the idea of observing other people observing the universe. In Blinked Myself Awake, she examines the fragility of memory, the unreliability of photography, the human desire for objectivity and the elusive nature of ‘truth’. She connects the dots in a highly personal narrative, interweaving images of stargazers with diary entries and fragments of the history of astronomy – a science that was changed forever by the invention of photography. Like Bieke Depoorter’s other books, this book plays an important role as an object. It is not a final product but an integral part of the work itself, with the design following this principle. Since the personal texts form the core of this work—which explores Depoorter’s lost memories and how they have influenced her life—designers Armand Mevis and Bieke Depoorter have chosen to reverse the design of a traditional photobook, printing these texts on thick (photo) paper while using thin recycled paper for the photographs of astronomers and the historical research, which often highlights (forgotten) female astronomers and recounts the search for evidence supporting scientific findings.