A magic ball becomes an unidentified planet. A horse floats in the night sky. An astronaut is lost on a construction site. In Event Horizon – l’Horizon des Événements (The Eriskay Connection, 2019), Belgian photographer Stéphanie Roland builds a fictional narrative around images that refuse to settle into a single reading, holding utopian and dystopian possibilities at once. Children appear as frozen, absent figures — not the carefree subjects of conventional family photography but presences closer to the ghosts of half-remembered dreams. Alongside them Roland places their “mental images”: visions of what is to come, disturbing memories, and strange material surfacing from the subconscious.
The book does not proceed as a straightforward sequence of photographs. Its flow is interrupted by deep blue pages carrying only ascending dates, an intervention that turns the experience of leafing through it into a question. Are we looking at the past from a distant future, or at the aftermath of events we are never shown directly? Across 96 pages Roland assembles a nocturnal, anticipatory atmosphere in which photography becomes an experimental field rather than a record of the visible. The images are staged, imagined, and constructed — including through her time at the European Space Agency and the Kennedy Space Center — and the book’s design by Rob van Hoesel sustains that tension on the page rather than resolving it.
For a collector, the interest lies less in spectacle than in how deliberately this object is built. The Otastar softcover, at 215 × 300 mm, gives the blue interruptions and the photographic sequence equal weight, so the book reads as a single constructed work rather than a portfolio of images. Roland’s subject — childhood as gravity and mystery rather than lightness — is handled with restraint, and the scientific and institutional context behind the project is absorbed into fiction, not displayed as documentation. Event Horizon belongs to the strain of contemporary photobooks in which narrative, sequencing, and design are inseparable, and it rewards the kind of slow reading that such books require.
