DESAGA

DESAGA gallery, Cologne
2012

On June 22, 2009, four months before Charlotte Desaga founded the independent commercial gallery Desaga in Cologne, Eastman Kodak Co. announced that after 74 years, production of Kodak Kodachrome—the world’s first and for decades most commercially successful color slide film—would be discontinued.

Before Charlotte Desaga opens the season on September 7, 2012, with the exhibition DESAGA by Marcel Hiller, Kodak has already been insolvent for months. Google, Samsung, and Apple intend to bid on the company’s patents. The name Kodak will likely persist, yet detached from the material it has stood for since its founding in 1892; it will no longer denote the unity of film material and apparatuses, easily operated by amateurs: "You push the button, we do the rest." 

In his work, Marcel Hiller negotiates the situational states of agreed-upon locations; he stages these places and heightens what is legible within them, contrary to their neutralizing representative claims. In the new rooms of Galerie Desaga, there will be objects of imagined use and imagined function, shaped not by the concreteness of imagination, but by their potential to represent and to be used.