'UNLEASHED' is the name of the collaborative project between the South African photographer Roger Ballen (1950) and the Dutch draftsman-sculptor Hans Lemmen (1959). Ballen's work can be called dark and Lemmen's rather poetic. Both have built up an oeuvre consisting of several thousand works with largely similar themes and imagery. In both their collages lots of animals, surreal, hallucinatory, archaic.
After this project, Lemmen developed a further fusion between drawing and photo. He scratched off parts of the photo and drew with charcoal. A wonderful chemistry was created: the white from the scratches and the black from the charcoal merged with the photo: the eye initially does not distinguish between photo and drawing. So, this was totally photograph but at the same time total drawing.
Lemmen recently became acquainted with the work of photographer Tarek Ode, who for years has passionately documented the prehistoric traces of the Guanches, the first inhabitants of the Canary Islands, for archaeologists and for himself. Lemmen was provided with his complete photo archive. They are often tranquil mountain or desert landscapes with archaeological sites.
A stay on Fuerteventura showed him graves from before the Spanish era, but also contemporary, improvised graves with inscriptions scratched into the cement, of people washed-up on the beach. His new work was thus unwillingly given a very topical content. The ancient and the new tombs, the tired, drying island, refugees and mass tourism, they merge in it, just like photograph and drawing.