On this day

On This Day is a new sample of Thomas Sauvin’s vast archive, ‘Beijing Silvermine’. That archive is the result of an intervention by the French collector that is now legendary: anonymous colour negatives were salvage from being melted down for their silver content from a recycling plant on the outskirts of the city. Instead, over many years living in China and now back in Paris, Sauvin bought the dusty negatives by the kilo in old rice bags.
His archive of images highlights China’s ambivalent relationship with the West. Simulations of the New York skyline, a Chinese basketball player posing in front of a poster of American player Michael Jordan, a Chinese tourist posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, obscured by a finger on the lens. In this context, amateur mistakes and damaged images take on a particular pathos. Shifted temporally and culturally, photographs that made sense to someone intimate become a puzzle – quirky, abstract and poetic. We are always on the outside; we know nothing about the scenes beyond their rough location and precise date, charging them with mystery.