Jonas Ersland

I’d like to show one project that’s recently finished, and one project that I’m currently working on.

The first project is a print / photo series called Blueprint for a Public Toilet that adressess the UV light installed in many public toilets to keep drug addicts away. The blue light makes the veins in your arms invisible, but by coincidence it’s also often the same type of light used to develop cyanotypes, an old photographic technique traditionally making use of sunlight. In this project I’ve photographed a series of these toilets around Berlin, and developed each photograph in the same toilet booth it depicts using the UV light already there. The project demonstrates how to ‘undo’ spaces of symbolic violence by simply changing their purpose – what was originally a space designed for exclusion could just as well be used as a space for creation.

The other project is based around a technique I’m currently working on where I extract fingerprints from objects in public, which I then apply to a 3d-model of the same object. The result is a rendition of the original object, visible only through the ways it was touched.

My website is jonasersland.net, and you can follow me on instagram at @jonasersland