Gazing towards the starry sky, DEAD RINGER explores the haunting qualities of photography, taking as its point of departure the period when the French revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui was imprisoned at Fort du Taureau in Brittany. In 1871, as barricades rose in the streets of Paris during the Paris Commune, Blanqui sat in his prison cell writing L’éternité par les astres (Eternity by the Stars).

Inspired by scientific discoveries in astronomy and developments in photography, he formulated a cosmological and speculative hypothesis about our world and its copies. Written in a photographic language dominated by the possibilities of reproduction and repetition, where words such as copy, stereotype, and cliché shape Blanqui’s cosmos. Through his political convictions, he envisioned a cosmic drama without beginning or end, where only the fortunate bifurcation could lead us forward.

Meanwhile, in Paris, the Communards staged the revolution by photographing themselves on the barricades, using a technology many encountered for the first time. Tempted to create the image of the successful revolution, they discovered new possibilities in the camera’s ability to seize a movement, a will that would lead to unforeseeable consequences.

DEAD RINGER returns to Blanqui’s cosmic visions and the spectral condition of the image, a presence bound as much to loss as to liberation.