Daan Paans has spent a decade tracing how images outlive the things they first described. Floating Signifiers gathers that research into case studies that move between deep time and recent memory: the extinct aurochs, a pre-human paradise, the projected future of a single oak, meteorites borrowed from science fiction, variations of the lion man, and the Golden Idol of Indiana Jones. Each subject arrives already transformed, and the book follows the transformation rather than pretending to recover a first, fixed original. The governing idea, borrowed from Heraclitus, is that everything observable keeps flowing; Paans asks what visual culture does with that current.
His working method is photographic at its base, but the photographs rarely stand alone. The book reflects a practice that moves through video, 3D renders, sculpture and documentary archive material, choosing its form according to what a given subject can bear. The case studies are not illustrations of a thesis but demonstrations of how a medium can be pried open when subject matter demands it. Under Rob van Hoesel’s design, the 160-page hardcover treats sequence and juxtaposition as arguments in their own right, letting archival fragments and constructed images share a page and a logic.
Nicky Heijmen contributes an essay that examines how the original meanings of cultural objects change over time and what those shifts do at a broader social level; Frank van der Stok edits the text. The collaboration is deliberate, and the volume reads as a considered object rather than a catalogue of works. What distinguishes it is this combination of a long research horizon with a flexible, installation-minded visual intelligence, held together by an argument about primal archetypes and their later lives.
Floating Signifiers offers a sustained, book-length inquiry into representation and origin from a photographer whose practice is unusually elastic, published by Eriskay Connection. It belongs with other serious engagements with the image as a mutable cultural artifact, and it rewards the kind of attention a physical book, read slowly, still makes possible.
