SIGNAL
055
Sometimes the image you want to collect doesn’t exist yet.
So you make it.
Collecting
Long before we became interested in art, design, or photography, we collected things.
Shells picked up on holidays. Stones carried home in our pockets. Small objects that caught our attention for reasons that were impossible to explain at the time.
Looking back, none of those things were particularly valuable. What mattered was that they felt worth keeping.
Years later, the objects changed, but the instinct stayed the same.
Instead of shells and stones, we started collecting images.
What Stays With Us
Most of the images we’ve saved over the years have very little in common.
Some are photographs. Others are paintings, film stills, advertisements, album covers, or things we stumbled across online and never forgot.
What connects them isn’t a style or a subject matter.
It’s something harder to define.
The images that stay with us are rarely the most beautiful ones. They’re the ones that seem to contain more than they reveal. The ones we keep returning to without fully understanding why.
In retrospect, collecting images was probably our first creative practice.
Not because we were studying them.
Because we were paying attention to them.
The Missing Image
At some point, collecting stops being enough.
You develop a sense for what interests you. You begin to recognize patterns in your own taste. And eventually you start looking for images that don’t seem to exist.
Not a specific photograph or artwork.
More of a feeling. A mood. A possibility.
Something you wish you could add to the collection.
But can’t find.
Making
Maybe that’s where creative work begins.
Not with self-expression, and not with a blank canvas.
But with the desire to see something that isn’t there yet.
Many of our own works started from that place.
Not as answers.
Simply as attempts to make the kind of images we would want to encounter ourselves.
Looking back, we don’t see collecting and creating as separate activities.
One eventually leads to the other.
You spend years gathering things that stay with you.
Then, if you’re lucky, you add something back.
From the studio,
Nastassja & Christian
SIGNAL is our studio’s newsletter — if it resonates, share it with a friend.