Portraits turned into tourist maps
A surrealist game initiated by Rik Lina and Ody Saban, with Bruno Barnabé and myself as participants
Atelier Wittenburg, Amsterdam
Winter 2025 to spring 2026, printed 18 May 2026
Rik Lina and Ody Saban set up a surrealist game without rules. Participants from France, Greece, the Netherlands, Brazil and Portugal each sent a work to a colleague, who was free to manipulate it, transform it or throw it away. The openness is the point.
I received work from Rik, Ody and Bruno Barnabé. Rather than the usual reply of collage or overpainting, I chose to manipulate the image using AI. For that I tried out a collaboration with Nano Banana, an agent that generates images from written instructions.
Working with Nano is like working with any human colleague, which is to say not always easy. It is headstrong, and what it made rarely matched what I had in mind. Steering it took long, detailed instructions, sometimes two pages, and still every attempt came back a little different. A colleague who answers the same question in a slightly new way each time until something holds it would, in any other line of work, be a problem. In a surrealist game it is the whole engine.
What worked arrived without being asked for. In one of Nano's versions of Rik's self-portrait I recognised the shape of the island of Saba, dear to us both. What if the portraits became tourist maps? The nose a mountain, the eyes villages, the mouth a river, complete with a legend and route markers. It worked, and not only for Rik. Bruno's submission was not a self-portrait at all, yet it redrew itself as landscape just as readily. My own contribution was a self-portrait built from the parts of a printer. The printer's axle became my nose, and out of that the map drew itself in turn.
Whether it is art, I leave to you. Whether it was a game, of that I am certain.
I do not much like working at a distance. Give me a studio and a few colleagues in the same room and the day takes care of itself. This game asked for something else, so I took on a colleague of a kind I had never used, not to replace the studio but to see what would happen. Some tracks led nowhere. I saw a dragon in Rik's portrait and had Nano draw it out; a coin turned up with his face on it. Clumsy, and they did not make the folder. I accept Nano as a colleague for the reason I accept any good one: not because it does what I say, but because it does not. Its stubbornness, set against my attention to what kept appearing anyway, was the right proportion. That is how automatic drawing works, and how I have always made my titles: by letting something arrive unplanned and deciding it belongs.
A one-off edition of five sets of twelve prints. Unnumbered.
"Rik"
"Ody"
"Bruno"
"Jan", after The Printer Self-portrait
