Over the 20 years of his career, Erik Kessels has come to the fore as a main and unquestionable reference in the field of so-called ‘found photography’. Instead of shooting new images for most of his projects, he brings together pre-existent photographs and reuses them as tiles to form his own mosaic. He is an artist without a camera or even a lens: in his practice, photography is a ready-made element to be sampled and re-contextualised. The result is a sort of eco-system of images, through which nothing is added to the enormous quantity of imagery which now crowds out the world and grows exponentially day by day, but which on the contrary merely recoups and recycles that which is already there.

In this lecture, Kessels will highlight his latest publications and give an insight in collecting and editing the photographs often found online or on flea markets from all over the world. Erik Kessels will also delve into the role of images in the time we live in, proposing other ways that we can look at these, rather than simply consuming them.