I speak with Batia Suter, a Swiss artist based in Amsterdam, about Octahydra, a project installed in the Roman Cryptoporticus as part of the 56th edition of Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles 2025, titled Images Indociles. For those unfamiliar with the figure of the artist, she is one of the most preeminent photographers working on image culture and its materiality. SuterB (born 1967, Switzerland) has developed a practice over several decades centered on collecting, editing, and recombining images; primarily drawn from printed sources such as encyclopedias, scientific publications, and archival books. Based in Amsterdam, her work often takes the form of large-scale installations and artist books, where images are reorganized into new visual systems.

Les Recontres d'ArlesA is one of the most important international photography festivals, held annually in the south of France. Each summer, exhibitions unfold across historical sites throughout the city. In this case, Octahydra occupies the Cryptoporticus: an U-shaped underground Roman structure dating to the 1st century BCE (around 30–20 BCE) that served as the foundational support for the Roman Forum. Long mistaken for Christian catacombs, it was identified as part of the Roman Forum during renovations in the 17th and 18th centuries; it was listed as a Historic Monument in 1841 and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981. Octahydra unfolds across the dim, humid corridors of the Cryptoporticus. Moving through the space, viewers encounter large-scale projections and printed images that overlap, echo, and interfere with the rough stone walls.

Since the task is to square the circle, it makes sense to begin at the end: Suter maintains that everything is architecture. Not architecture as discipline, but as structure: anything that organizes perception, relation, and experience. Almost like an epistemological system. Even the human figure melts into this condition. In her images, it appears only residually–almost as Staffage1; in Octahydra, as she notes, as ghosts. A double genius loci of the Roman structure, materializing through something immaterial: projected light. Architecture, then, is not what is represented, but what sustains and activates what might be called an image-lore.

Lore

At first glance, Suter’s method of collecting images–mostly black and white, or desaturated–appears aligned with an anthropological impulse. However, this apparent classificatory urgency quickly dissolves, as the images are neither contextualized nor explained. They are displaced and recombined, set into relation. Removed from their original hierarchies, they no longer produce knowledge in any stable sense. What emerges instead is an unstable, relational, ever-shifting field.

Even though we could relate this practice to the Post-processual,2 it seems insufficient. What is at stake is not simply interpretation, but circulation: an in-between. For this reason, it may be more precise to speak of a relational lore. A term I take from English–even though it has recently become trendy as internet slang–meaning “knowledge gained through study or experience.” Unlike anthropology, which seeks origins, structures, and truth, lore accumulates–a “lore dump,” as Gen Z might call it–and may refer to a fictional universe. In Suter’s work, images behave accordingly, connecting what does not belong together (scientifically, or within traditional classification), mutating their significations through the relations they establish. I understand this method as a kind of undisciplined anthropology. Or, as proposed here: a relational lore.

Lore is background: the associations between and within images. In Suter’s case, these do not operate at the level of language, but below it, activating what she herself links to psychological reflexes embedded in perception. Her research turns inward, toward the images themselves and their material condition. The insistence on printed matter is not nostalgic. These images are, as she describes, “signs of time”: objects that have passed through multiple stages of reproduction and degradation, carrying duration within them.

Jungian Archetypes

In Octahydra, however, Suter introduces digitally produced images: plastic food trays.E Although their nature seems distinctive–too contemporary, too banal–their cavities function as grids, echoing architectural plans, engineering components, or structural pieces. They, again, become architecture. In our conversation Suter mentions that her father was an engineer; it is difficult not to read these images through that lens. Not as biography, but as a way of seeing. The trays operate as micro-architectures; points of connection within a broader field of forms. The monumental and the disposable coexist: architecture, engineering, and (pop) material culture. Categories dissolve into morphology, stripping anthropology of its classificatory verticality, its scientific authority. We enter, therefore, into a relational field where meaning emerges only through combination. Nothing is fixed.

Returning to how Suter recollects images, the movement turns inward: opening a book, a page, images. Different objects, but the same format. A square within a square. And not only that: in Octahydra, a persistent repetition of shapes–circles, squares, grids. It seems that architectural typologies begin to function more like archetypes. Here, her work brushes against Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and Freud’s pupil and colleague, Jung developed the concept of archetypes as recurring structures within the collective unconscious patterns that shape perception and meaning across cultures. Suter’s repeated use of these forms organizes recognition before meaning: buildings resemble faces, bodies, animals. Analogously to Jungian archetypes,3 these forms act as structures through which perception organizes itself; we react before we understand them. Architecture becomes, in this sense, an unconscious repository.

Squaring the Circle

Carl Jung spent much of his intellectual life tracing this figure through dreams, medieval alchemical manuscripts, Eastern mandalas, and the spontaneous drawings of his patients. The square, for Jung, represented the fourfold structure of consciousness: thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition–the rational architecture of the world. The circle represented the infinite, the unconscious, the cyclical.

Quadratura circuli: to square the circle.C Historically, an impossible geometrical problem (the challenge of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle using only a compass and straightedge), later adopted in alchemical traditions as a symbol of transformation: the reconciliation of opposites, the translation of the infinite into the finite. To reconcile the continuous with the bounded.

In Suter’s work, this operation becomes concrete through photography. Pick up any camera—analogue or digital, large-format or pocket—and you hold in your hands a rectangle housing a circle. The body of the instrument, with its right angles and flat planes, encloses a lens that is always, inescapably, round. This is not mere engineering. It is, rather, the enactment of one of the most persistent symbolic structures in the history of the psyche: the circle within the square.

When the two appear together–when the circle is inscribed within the square, or the square within the circle–what is being staged is the alchemical process itself: the coniunctio, the sacred marriage, the coincidentia oppositorum. The camera performs this union each time it is raised to the eye. This mechanism of coniunctio repeats throughout the work, almost to excess: the juxtaposition of a radically modern architectural icon with a hut; the materials of construction–wood and stone; the geographical axis–North and South, as Suter notes.

Printed images, foregrounding their status as, back to Suter’s words, “signs of time,” are confronted with digitally produced photographs of plastic trays, allowing the monumental and the disposable to coexist within the same visual system. Even the juxtaposition of the ephemeral–the circular light of projectors flooding the space–with the permanence of the Roman Cryptoporticus: a rectangle.

Squatting the Circle

At the Cryptoporticus, photography reveals itself as an architectural process: one that translates circular vision into a near-square format that imposes order, limits, and structure, echoing both ancient symbolic systems and contemporary image technologies.

But then something shifts. The projections begin to exceed their frames. Light spills. Edges dissolve. The circle–the beam–refuses full containment within the rectangle. It slips, overlaps, interferes. The installation redefines architecture through instability–through what could be described as a Jungian glitch:4 a system in which structures fail to fully contain what they generate.

The space itself participates. The underground ruin already carries a certain estrangement–architectural, yet hidden; familiar, yet difficult to access. Into this environment, Suter introduces forms that resemble buildings but lack material substance. Here, the work enters what Sigmund Freud described as the Unheimlich5–a term often translated as “the uncanny,” referring to the unsettling experience in which something familiar appears strange–, further extended into architecture by Anthony Vidler.6 The familiar becomes unstable. Recognition does not resolve perception; it complicates it. The repetitive and modular qualities of Suter’s digital images intensify this condition. Doubling, patterning, return—structures that Freud associates with the uncanny.

The installation–imagined in collaboration with Sami Rintala–becomes a system in motion: everything within it appears to shift, to echo, to glitch. What remains is a field in which relations take precedence over meanings, structures over objects, perception over certainty. A space where architecture is no longer confined to buildings, and images no longer represent, but operate.

The circle was never squared, but squatted. Or perhaps the circle was the squatter itself. One cannot ignore the post-colonial undertone: a hut–ephemeral,7 at least from a Western perspective–occupying a Roman structure, understood, again by the very same lens, as eternal. A condition that, as Suter notes, has historical precedent: the Àrles arena was used to build inside during medieval times. The hut “seems to have haunted everyone involved in building long before building was distinguished from architecture,” as Joseph Rykwert notes in On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History.D

A clash. And a coexistence. A possession, as Jung understands it: “that round thing was in possession of the magical key which unlocked the closed doors of matter”.8 Photography? Or architecture?