On This Day

On This Day revolves around two archives. One is the Beijing Silvermine, founded in 2007 by Thomas Sauvin which consists of 850,000 photographic negatives to date collected from recycling stations around the Beijing region of China and covering the years following the Cultural Revolution, from the introduction of the compact camera in 1985 to the introduction of digital photography in 2005. The other archive is the Euro-American database onthisday.com, which maintains a daily register of selected world events. The artists have paired the date-stamped images from China with events of that day from the database.

Excerpt from essay by Daniel Palmer in the book On This Day from 2021: “Every image suggests a story. But Sauvin never wanted to be the sole author of the archive, and constantly seeks new perspectives on it in collaboration with others. Swedish artists Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt are logical collaborators, given their publications have also sought to excavate complex layers of history and explore the gaps between what is visible and knowable. (…) By using the date stamped photographs to drive their investigation, one readymade archive driving the other, they force together two incommensurable sources of incomplete information about the world. ‘Two inadequate descriptive systems’, as Martha Rosler might say, the gap between them complicating the self-evidentiary claims of each other, revealing their obvious omission and biases.”

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On This Day
A project by Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt and Thomas Sauvin
Photographs: Beijing Silvermine
Selected by Thomas Sauvin [2021]
Text: On This Day
http://www.onthisday.com/ [2021-02-11— 2021-02-17]
Essays by Daniel Palmer and Johannes Wahlström
Design by Axel von Friesen and Michael Evidon
100 pages with 100 color plates
Full color offset
Bound with brass fasteners
Soft cover with silk screen printing
First edition: 500