For more than three decades, Ria Verhaeghe has collected, classified and re-examined press images, building Provisoria, an evolving personal archive drawn from the vast and largely ephemeral flow of news photography. Her practice investigates how images shape collective memory and how unexpected connections can emerge between events, people and histories that might otherwise remain unrelated. Rather than treating photographs as fixed records of reality, Verhaeghe approaches them as material whose meanings can shift through acts of selection, juxtaposition and transformation.

Glenden is one of several series through which Verhaeghe interrogates this self-assembled archive. Working with newspaper photographs printed on opposite sides of the same page, she allows images from unrelated stories – perhaps a terrorist attack, a sporting triumph or a political event – to bleed into and merge with one another. The result is a third image, one that belongs to neither source alone.

Verhaeghe describes this process as “1 + 1 = 3.” The encounter between two images produces something beyond their individual meanings, unsettling their original contexts and generating new, sometimes unexpected associations. In these works, the newspaper becomes more than a vehicle for information: it is a space where separate narratives converge, revealing how meaning is formed not only by what an image depicts, but also by what it encounters.