Category: VIDEOS AND SLIDESHOWS

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Nella selva antica

 

The following is a survey of the sides of my work dealing with “historicized” nature and “naturalized” history. It treats of a photography-based work, where the photograph is always somehow “modest”, not only because for me is “just” a document, but because such a modesty allows, then, my further interventions.

 

Gulliver in Lavera, 2010  (01)

My interest in landscapes resonates with my interest in faces to the extent that both involve the same type of approach to the photographic medium. Both subjects also correspond to my interest in intermediary spaces, which are not completely natural yet not yet fully “humanized”. The photographs in this series were shot at dawn on a winter Sunday, at the industrial site of Lavera, one of the largest petrochemical complexes in Europe, built in a once-idyllic spot on the Provence coast. I will quote a passage from an article by Daniela Goeller, who speaks more eloquently than I can.

“The landscape is a complex construction. It is way of looking at an environment and exists only through the eyes of the viewer. More than a reflection of the outside world and the surrounding countryside, the landscape constitutes an ideal space for projection and reflects different artistic and political visions and concepts imposed by our civilization on nature through the centuries.” ( http://www.tk – 21.com/Gulliver -a- Lavera ).

These images comprise different layers. In the foreground, a beach view fronting some industrial buildings. Then two layers: very diluted paint drippings that creates a sort of cloud (or sun) upon drying; and printed on glass in the foreground — almost erased by the rudimentary method of transferring prints with trichloroethylene — are engravings from Gulliver’s Travels.

The choice to re-use and “re-engrave” illustrations of Gulliver’s Travels, an allegorical and satirical work by Jonathan Swift, with other historical images, is significant: the work was written in the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment characterized by faith in justice and progress, which are subtly mocked by Swift. It is also the century of Piranesi and the romantic fascination with ruins, which is possible only if they are considered as a nostalgic remnant and not a real possibility (Albert Speer exercise I was talking yesterday was actually an “exercise of style”); such an “enlighted” vision allows ruins to be used for decorative purposes.  (02a-02b)

The chemical plants that I imagine Gulliver finds on the shore instead of the Lilliputians, are not (yet) ruins, but I confess that I conceived this work a few months before the Fukushima accident (March 2011), which demonstrates the enduring power of Nature and sets, once more, some questioning about where the Enlightenment Age is taking us. I didn’t want it to be an illustration of a contemporary event, and it took me long before showing it.  (03)

 

Robinson a Rosignano, 2011  (03bis)

As a complement to the previous series, a few months later I created a few works named after the fictional character of Robinson Crusoe. It is well known that Jonathan Swift wrote his famous novel, Gulliver’s Travels, partially as a reaction to Defoe’s optimistic vision of the relation between nature and humankind. You can tell me if I am wrong, but one could say that Swift is on the side of a “hard primitivism”, which would be more linked to materialistic philosophies, according to Erwin Panofsky on his article on a Piero di Cosimo (1466-1521) cycle of paintings, “The early history of man”, (Journal of the Warburg Institute, vol. I, n. 1, July 1937); while Defoe could be on the side of a “soft primitivism”, let’s say more idealistically and “Golden Age” oriented.

Piero di Cosimo himself, according to Vasari biography, was practicing a form of “natural” life closer to Hell than to Eden, like in this “primitive hunting scene” (I do owe, among other findings, the discovery of this cycle to Gilles Tiberghien book Art, nature paysage, Arles 2001). Please notice how in this painting there is no hierarchy, or psychological difference, between men, beasts and hybrid creatures. This is a vision of the early times of humanity that is neither biblical nor neo-platonic. What a difference with this other hunting scene, painted about thirty years previously, in 1470, by another Florentine, Paolo Uccello (1397-1475), and of which Piero was fully aware: here nature is so completely submitted to human action that it becomes a demonstration of geometry.  (03ter)

But, coming back to my subject: in the Tuscany coast town of Rosignano Marittimo, there exists a stretch of white sand beaches that resembles the Caribbean islands. (04a) Although these beaches may appear natural and are appreciated by tourists in the summer season, they were created by the waste of a sodium hydroxide factory, owned by the Belgian firm Solvay.  (04b)

I went to these beaches in wintertime (like many, I like seashores in winter) and photographed the site. Afterward, I combined these images with reproductions of fishermen’s tools from Greenland, using red translucent paint, and engravings taken from various editions of Defoe’s book.

I imagined translating the very moment in which Robinson, not believing his own eyes, found the traces of human feet in the sand.  (05-07)

 

Drum songs, 2010-2011  (08a)

Somewhere in a Nordic island, urbanscapes set side by side with landscapes, the former accompanied by transcriptions from the East Greenland drum contests (the poetic duels the Inuit used to perform to resolve conflicts, to avoid killing each other), the latter accompanied by reproductions of objects retrieved from the harbor, presented like scientific plates. Printed writings over images of civilization, red signs over images of nature, with no other purpose than to let them accompany each other.  (08b-09c)

 

Marmo, 2011-2012  (10)

In the autumn of 2011 I returned to Italy to photograph the subject of nature exploited by humans. I wanted to compile a stock of images to work on during the winter months. But I found humans submerged by natural phenomena. I encountered days of heavy rainfall and flooding in Tuscany, and the trip was unsuccessful.

I did however manage to take four acceptable photographs, in the marble quarries of the cloud-covered mountains of Cararra. On the long trip home, avoiding the highways and taking side roads, I stopped where I knew of abandoned churches, and I photographed the second image incorporated into each of these pieces: a detail of artifacts made out of perennial marble; medieval churches are among the most striking symbols of Western civilization.

So this series depicts both concavity (the quarried mountain from which the marble is extracted) and convexity (the sculpted marble of the cathedral).  (11-14)

 

Romitorio, 2011  (15)

If you hike in the Fiora valley, in the Latium region just South of Tuscany, and go up and down on banks collapsed after recent floods, and you enter woodlands tangled like jungles, you can reach a couple of romitori, or hermits places, which survived the centuries, thanks to their isolation and to the little interest they have aroused in succeeding generations.

Here is Poggio Conte: past a waterfall that provided drinking water to the monks, you can see the remains of two tiny cells, to which lead arduous steps carved into the tufa, and a Cistercian-inspired rupestrian church. Its interior – in spite of the oculus carved into the facade – is completely dark: if you make photographs, it will be at random, and only the film development will reveal the surviving fragments of the paintings that decorated the vaults. You will discover that this hermit from end of XIII or beginning of XIV Century (perhaps a monk of French origin?) painted the walls with decorative motifs decisively prosaic, reminding more of an interior design than of an exercise of meditation or veneration.  (16-17)

Nature is slowly retaking its rights; mosses and lichens cover lily flowers, red griffins and phallic shapes. Slowly fades away the work of the solitary men who spent years in shaping and covering with colors this dark cavern, being aware that very few people would ever look at them. Over my intrusive flash photos I superimposed, as a weave backlit readable, a sonnet taken from the Canzoniere of Petrarch. It speaks, in beautiful metaphors, of priceless sufferings of love. I transcribed it in a continuum, like a telex.

(18)  I don’t know if there is anything in common between this text and these paintings, apart from the fact that both poet and painter belonged to the same half a Century.

 

In Tuscia, 2012  (19)

The San Pietro Bridge near Farnese, after flooding; the Etruscan site of Rofalco, after archeological excavation; the tangled forest known as la Selva del Lamone, where a trail has been blazed.

These images have been reproduced on glass and superimposed on white paintings with a fluorescent shape, which creates a shift in the surfaces, endowing the work with what I consider a trace of modernity that was otherwise missing.  (20-22)

 

Rupestrian, 2012-2013  (23)

Although the term rupestrian denotes an art form ‘executed on or with rocks’ (e.g. tombs, sanctuaries, cave paintings or inscriptions), it can also refer to the process by which human-made creations fade away and become part of their surroundings.

In this sense, Rupestrian occurs at the meeting point of nature and history. In such instances, it is not only as if civilization and abandonment occurred in successive waves over the centuries; rather one was the pre-condition of the other. A natural site transformed into a “work” through human intervention is, in turn, retrieved by nature, which makes a “work” out of what remains of the initial human intervention. For me it is not so much about working horizontally in space (e.g. Land Art) as engaging vertically with time, which serves as a medium in a process of stratification ― a form of the ‘reverse archaeology’ I was mentioning yesterday.  (24-30)  You noticed that several of these works present the silhouette of a wild animal, either sewed on the plastic or transferred on the glass. They are taken from a Portuguese popularization booklet, found in a flea market, and are meant to symbolize the return of the natural element.

 

Land paintings, 2013  (31)

I call these photographic works Land paintings. They are an attempt to respond to a question about my own presence within historical space. I have tried to define this location through the concept of “rupestrian”.

In recent years, whenever I could, I hiked around the Tuscia region, north of Rome, in a sparsely inhabited land full of prehistoric and archaeological sites, with a leaf, or a tongue, made out of latex dipped in red fluorescent pigment, leaving it on the ground, and then shooting it. The Etruscan tombs, which become medieval hermitages, then sheepfolds, then wartime shelters, finally lovers hideouts, are the usual stops of my wanderings.

I decided to entitle this photographic body of work “land paintings” partly as a reference to the notion of “picturesque” so dear to several land artists active in the 1960s and 1970, and in opposition to the modernist vision of a work of art seen as a unique, timeless experience, to be grasped in one single glance. The title is also meant to evoke the idea of stepping on earth, looking for hidden and forgotten places.

In my previous work, the sign placed on the photograph was a means of preventing the fruition of the image in its entirety, of opening up a gap of time within it, by using a fluorescent color that displaced the vision. This intrusive element is now a material one and becomes an artwork as soon as the photograph is taken. This is the reason I don’t usually add other semantic levels to it. Also, in contrast to Land art, I don’t transform the site into which I introduce myself, I just leave a sign.

This sign left on the sites before photographing them constitutes a marker of my “I have been there” but also a way of seizing the baton, in a relay race with the past. And here I would simply like to recall that, in Italian, the baton is called il testimone, “the witness”.  (32-39)

Sometimes, though, when I was in the presence of an articulated human construction more or less preserved, I felt the need to superimpose layers of writings and colors on the images.

For instance, in the “Garden of the Monsters” of Bomarzo, which I again consider a “rupestrian” site  (40a)  (rocks become statues, statues are deformed by natural elements), what is developed is an iconographic program inspired by alchemy and mythology; we are in the Mannerist age (second half of XVIth century); many writings carved on the sculptures are quite cryptic (can you read, all around the ogre leaps, the sentence “Ogni pensiero vola”, “Every thought flies”?). As a resonance to that, I blurred my own images with several semantic layers, either scratched glass or dripped paint.

This series is titled Horror vacui: (40b-42)

  

Nel parco, 2013

When I was reviewing the text for this lecture, a couple of weeks ago, and trying to find the proper translation for Il parco dei mostri, I suddenly realized that my inclination to a “vertical” presence in a given historical space depended not only on my background as a researcher, but on my own biography. When I returned to the Bomarzo garden wasn’t it to retrace my own steps, to find echoes of voices and sounds, which had, once, filled these empty spaces? Was I not rehearsing a family party somewhere in the late 1960s, filmed with a Super 8 camera?   (43a-43j)

 

Nella selva antica, 2014 

1. On the Plateau. (44a)  Last year a friend told me that my series of works entitled “Rupestrian” reminded her of Robert Pogue Harrison’s essay on forests (Forests. The Shadows of Civilization, Stanford 1992). I found that book and read it but set it aside for a long time. The concept that I took from it is that the forest is a human invention, a cultural contrivance. At that time, I was thinking about my literary models of a now-gone generation who experienced the Second World War in their youth: Nuto Revelli, Primo Levi and others. The last survivor was Mario Rigoni Stern (1921-2008). Born in the Asiago plateau, an area heavily damaged during World War I, Rigoni was influenced by the nationalistic rhetoric and wanted to pursue a military career. However before long he became convinced of the injustice of the war, a conviction that was further strengthened during his service in the Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia, in the disastrous retreat of January 1943, and subsequently in his years of internment in a German military concentration camp. When, at the end of the war, Rigoni flew to get home, he hid himself in the Austrian forest and survived eating leaves, berries, bird eggs and snails.

The theme of the forest, as that natural site completely destroyed by Austrian and Italian bombs between 1915 and 1918 and subsequently replanted, exemplifying the ‘artificial’ that laboriously reverts to a natural state, is central to Rigoni’s oeuvre.  (44b, c, d)

For Rigoni the forest is a mirror of the world “as it should be”, a world where “siamo tutti compaesani”, we all belong to the same village (allow me to note that in both Italian and French, the word for landscape, paesaggio/paysage, come from the Latin pagus, which means village and, by extension, country). In this ecosystem we can all live together, men and beasts of various species, once the carrying capacity of the environment is under control (and the share of passionate hunters like Rigoni has been taken).  (44e)

But the good forest, according to Rigoni, is not the one that grows spontaneously and wildly. Rather the good forest is the one tamed by human labor, where humankind plays the role of the caring gardener.

As I wandered, as a tourist, around Rigoni’s homeland I recorded some images of forests, which, upon closer inspection, reveal traces of the war: the collapsed trenches, the craters created by bombs. There I encountered a theme of my Rupestrian series: these sites are also taken back by nature, even if here the traces left behind are the result of humankind’s diabolical engineering rather than its creativity.

And what do these photographs have to do with the verses Dante penned to describe his entry into earthly paradise, the “ancient forest”, at the summit of the Mount of Purgatory, and his encounter with the beautiful and spiritual Matelda, guardian of the Terrestrial Paradise, where flowers bloom without being sown? “Qui fu innocente l’umana radice; qui primavera sempre e ogni frutto…”, Here the root of Humanity was innocent: here is everlasting Spring, and every fruit… (Purgatorio, XXVIII, 142-143)  (45-47)

 

1. In the Lamone. (48)  Dante was certainly the last visitor to the Garden of Eden. No forest, not even the ancient forest that covered the volcanic formations of the Tuscia region in central Italy, can be considered primeval forest; even the conservation is an artificial fact. In the Selva del Lamone natural reserve, for instance, everywhere traces of human “civilization” can be found: dilapidated walls, the remains of road pavement, the furrows of the charcoal wagons, the heaps of stones that once constituted Etruscan walls, and today the strips of white and red paint on the network of trails.

This is all but the nature depicted by Leopardi in his Operette morali, a powerful and cruel nature that, in its manifestations, doesn’t even bother to know what happens to mankind (Dialogo della natura e di un islandese, 1824). This is a today European natural “park”, where the primeval is doomed to be just reminiscence: trees, bushes, rocks covered by moss look at my eyes like Romantic Age fake ruins.

My photographs taken in the Selva are reproduced on transparent layers and superimposed on reproductions and personal variations of prehistoric petroglyphs; those in Nevada date to ten thousand years ago and are the oldest discovered on the North American continent. They are the signs of an era when humankind was just beginning to appropriate nature. They are reproduced with red fluorescent acrylic paint, as a gesture of signage, the difference with the petroglyphs being only the technology of the reproduction.  (49)

 

Here you find a variation on this same subject, a series named Eden; I just emphasized the relation to the theme of ruins into nature that we were discussing previously. (50-51)

This series means for me an open and unresolved reflection on nature seen as a historical phenomenon;

Going back to Panofsky considerations on Piero di Cosimo, his “hard primitivism” can be seen as one of the two historical lines in the human relation to nature, as pointed out by Robert Harrison: an “antagonistic” line, marked by the Enlightenment idea of the human progress “against” and “in spite of” nature, which is aimed to the future and eventually could lead to the destruction of nature; and a nostalgic, romantic view of a “natural” state of human purity. In such a vision the early times of mankind weren’t the “primitive form of existence as a truly bestial state” described by Piero, but rather Dante’s earthly Paradise.

At the beginning of his book on Forests, Harrison quote the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico: “This was the order of human institutions: first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies…” (The New science, 1725). But after this passage Vico goes on: “the nature of the peoples is such that first it is crude, afterward severe, then benign, later on delicate, eventually dissipate”.     Now, I wouldn’t say that this thinker belongs to one of the two lines we were mentioning.

Rigoni Stern takes on Vico’s reflection, and assumes that the city (the last stage of human progress before academies, if one trusts Vico) has become a place of “spiritual solitude”, where “barbarity dwells in the very hearth of the humans” and states that the wood has become a place of salvation, “Ed ecco che il bosco è diventato luogo di salvamento” (Introduction to Boschi d’Italia, Roma 1993).

I just point out how this word “salvamento” echoes with “salvatico”, “salvation” almost sounds like “savage”.

We can say, at the end, that Rigoni represents a form of “soft positivism”: nature, accompanied by the man, will always come over the deadly enterprise that is war (and, I would say, civilization). But the man, in order to survive along with the nature, needs to take from it only “a part of its interests” and never touch its very capital.

 

1. Ferula lamonis. (52)  Ferula communis (Giant fennel) has been known by humankind since mythological times. Prometheus is said to have brought fire to humans in a fennel stalk. Moreover, a ferula stick crowned with a pinecone and decorated with vine leaves was carried by the Maenads who followed Dionysus’ cortege. Whereas its cousin, Foeniculum vulgare, is healthful, ferula is a toxic and invasive plant. Known as narthex – ‘scourge’ – in Greek, it grows in the deciduous forests of the arid coastal plains of Sardinia, Greece and the Maremma. However, unlike the ferula in Dionysian rituals, it is infertile in this environment, making it appear as a mere intruder.  (53-55)

 

Here you have some variations on the theme.  (56-57)  I added to my photograph a print taken from the plates of Georges-Louis Buffon Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (second half of XVIII Century), depicting wild animals. In his lifelong enterprise of describing quadrupeds and birds, creating a classification dependent on their degree of “sympathy” towards mankind, Buffon “liked to set up those animals in mythological settings and in History’s harmonious remains, referring back to an almost “Rousseauist” state of innocence” (quoting the writer Francis Rousseau). I do extract these illustrations from their original background to set them in a more uncanny context.

And, finally, what I find a more accomplished work inspired by Rigoni Stern books and places; the “return to the heights”: Anabasis.  (58-61)  I did show you the different steps of my procedure, which is at a same time an ideological commitment: to constantly affirm the multiplicity of any image, as well as of any individuality.  (62)

SP, 2014-2015

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History, photography, evidences

 

The starting point of my interest in the medium of photography is a direct inquiry into its nature as a truth-bearer. I am interested in photography, first of all, as testimony, understanding that a testimony, if not false, is at least able to be interpreted in multiple ways.
In regard to the photograph’s subject matter, I consider photography to be a ready-made; it affords a certain freedom of manipulation, which, in my case, implies almost always a slight displacement of the subject. In such a displacement I recognize my work as the work of a translator.
From this perspective, there is no difference between the found image and the created one; photography is merely a document. It’s a matter of taking the image and removing it from itself, in order to open it up to other, possible interpretations, in order to encourage its movement.
I will show you two sets of images: the first set concerns several recent works based on archival materials; the second set documents a few site installations I created in Norway, France, and Italy.

La Buoncostume, suite (mixed media, 2009)  (01)
In January 2008, in a dumpster near the police headquarters in Rome, a bin man found two large garbage bags full of photographs: eight thousand images (identification, monitoring, evidences), “no longer relevant to the investigations,” which the police threw away instead of bestowing them to the State Archives. The found images were acquired by an antiquarian bookshop, Il Museo del Louvre; an exhibition was organized and the information was communicated to the newspapers. But the same day of the opening, the Civil Guard, sent by the Authority of the Cultural Heritage, entered the gallery and seized all the material presented, including the exhibition catalogs. However, a gallery assistant managed to hide one of the catalogs, which I used to choose and modify six images: they surely come from the “vice squad” of the police and, judging by the clothes of the suspects, would date from the late sixties. Working on them, I tried to keep the idea of a series, superimposing these photographs, which have a certain statuary elegance, over texts drawn from an Italian grammar book. There is no relationship between images and text, except perhaps the fact that these texts establish rules, which are linguistic rules.   (02-05)

Leçons d’anthropométrie (mixed media, 2009-2010)   (06)
The series Leçons d’anthropométrie derives from my researches in the archives of the department of Gard (southern France). It is well known that any nomadic or itinerant had to carry an “anthropometric book,” which was stamped at every entrance or exit of a French village. This book was in effect from 1912 to 1969. It contained, in addition to personal data and characteristics of the carrier, his photograph (face and profile) and the fingerprints of all ten fingers, following the instructions dictated by the world famous criminologist Alphonse Bertillon. I chose six photographs of anonymous members of the same family (taken in the twenties), and reproduced them on glass. I transcribed with a marker, on the cardboard backdrop, some articles of the law ruling the movements of the nomads. I painted red and white geometric shapes over it that could recall the Russian Constructivists or the Bauhaus designers. To confuse the identification process, I overlaid the frontal image of a person with his profile, or with a picture of a relative.   (07-09)

Phantombilder (mixed media, 2010)   (10)
My last example of the difficult relation between truth and image is also the most paradoxical. I refer to the so-called photo fits of the German police (and, perhaps, of other national police departments), which one can find easily on the Internet. In a technical sense, photo fits are photographs, that is, photographic reproductions. But, at the same time, they do not reproduce anything. They are merely pieces of fixed memory, artificially reconstructed. What they reproduce does not exist, even though they are images as credible as “true” photographs.
We are here before a kind of icon of a face, which seems strangely flat to us, and which bears something doubly uncanny – to borrow Freud’s term -, something like a double death: the first one produced by the photographic process itself, the second one by the montage procedure. This results from the effect of the death mask which—as Alfred Döblin observes in 1929 in his introduction to August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit, Visage of time—is proper to photography (Döblin was surely referring to the then famous wax mask of L’Inconnue de la Seine, and wax or plaster casting can be seen as a double of photography, since both are deadly in their capacity to freeze time and to condemn a subject like the Unknown of the Seine to be young and smiling forever).   (11-12)
To return to the German Phantombilder, what is lacking in them is the asymmetry that characterizes each individual, that is, the irregularity or the accident: the history of a face and a person. What remains is an icon, a logo, which nobody will ever recognize, but which will be useful in defining an individual.
How have I treated these phantom-images? I have made them transparent, reproducing them on glass. I have placed them in simple square frames. I have superimposed them on contemporary wallpapers, in an attempt to give them an “uncanny familiarity.”  (13-14)
Lingering on allegories taken from Freud’s texts, I could refer to his famous article on the Wunderblock (A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad, 1925); my work, indeed, is a work of stratification. But, if I do add layer upon layer, this is not in order to liberate the past or to make it more legible, whether in the first or the last instance. On the contrary, in a kind of “reverse archaeology”, I create a blurred image that perhaps could lead to the intuition of “something else”, that I don’t know and that I can’t anticipate.
The following slides document my attempt to follow a single process that re-takes the existing image and translates it in another language. Sometimes only a slight shift is needed.
Mirror (dripped) 01  (15)
Teatrino (dripped) 01 and 02   (16-17)
Pontormo-LG   (18-19)
These works must be taken – among others – as a criticism of the eugenic attempt not only to define human “types” but also to find the “truth” of an individual through the examination of facial signs. I have used the illustrations from La nouvelle iconographie de la Salpétrière, the photographic revue published in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century by Professor Charcot and his assistant Albert Londe.
I would just note that, in my effort to resist the mimetic “swallowing-up” of the photographic image, I have made it vulnerable to other agents; for instance, the red fluorescent signs and the drippings are a dramatic element whose function is to remove the photograph from its own saturation: here it is not possible to read an image without the eye being forced to encounter the above-mentioned “something else”, a something else that displaces the image and moves it into a different context.

Laralia. A transient monument.   (20)
This work, made in Norway in 1999, was entitled Laralia. The dictionary tells us that, in ancient Roman times, the Lares were the ancestors’ spirits, whose images, made out of painted wood or cast wax, were collected and worshipped in a specially designated part of the home called the Laralia.
These pictures were periodically displayed in processions, and then set on fire. Pliny the Elder mentions them in the section of Naturalis Historia devoted to painting (Book, XXXV, 6-7): in his criticism of modern art then in vogue, he underlines the moral value of these portraits, which served not only to commemorate the deceased, but also to accompany the living, so that “when somebody died, the entire assembly of his departed relatives was also present.”
Ten pictures of local people, chosen at random among the ones conserved at the Fjaler Folkbibliotek in Dale, underwent a multi-staged process of transformation: first, they were deformed in order to reveal their Anamorphosis, reminiscent of the long evening shadows; then, they were enlarged to life size; finally, their silhouettes were traced and cut out on boards of pine wood. (21)
These black silhouettes were placed atop a hill and then set on fire, in a brief ceremony. On the other end, the three-meter-high wooden boards, from which the silhouettes were carved, were erected upon a plateau, above the village of Dale. During the day, in sunlight, the shadows on the ground change shape, cross each other, and are, for a fleeting moment, similar to the original picture.
The instantaneous freezing of the photographic image documents a unique state of a person and is meant to be recognisable by the person’s relatives and the collective memory. In this installation the image is subjected to multiple reproductions, which progressively distance the subject from its departure point.
The final stage of this process – the woodcut – is the opposite of the photographic image, in terms of the time and energy required for its execution; the slowness can be seen as a less tyrannical and more intense way of recording the image. The ten pictures, transformed into steles whose commemorative function is only vaguely related to the individuals they portray, will surrender to the action of time and nature, which will further modify them and ultimately lead to their decay.   (22-28)

The cares of a family man   (29)
The title of the next work is The cares of a family man. I don’t know why I named it after Franz Kafka’s novel, Die Sorge des Hausvaters, where the main character is a shapeless and changing creature made out of left-overs and living in the most obscure parts of a mansion. I think that unconsciously I identify Odradek with the beast that dwells in each of our homes, the beast of identification and of the measurement of the other, the same beast that today, in the streets of France, expresses itself with the slogan “ici on est chez nous!”, “here it’s our home”.   (30)
This same beast forbids August Sander, in the mid-thirties of last Century, to publish his portraits, because of his unwelcome “Enlightenment” aesthetics and because of the Socialist Workers Party involvement of his son Erich. After this, he was doomed to realize gorgeous landscape photographs of hilltops in the Cologne region; he also composed a couple of strange visual cut ups, made out of facial details belonging to diverse individuals. The two surviving panels bear the title Studies: Mankind, while the subjects of his previous work were always identified, at least with the mention of their profession.  (31)  I think that these “dissections” demonstrate a giving up of the principle of identification, as well as the “second death” of the subject to which I referred at the beginning of my talk.
I would also remark that, in Sander’s images, the face is only a component of the recorded signs: the posture, the clothing, all seem to have as much importance, as in this photographic portrait, dated 1938, whose title is National Socialist, Head of Department of Culture (copyright Die Photographische Sammlung, August Sander Archiv, Cologne).   (32)
You surely know that in the late Thirties Sander made several clandestine portraits that bear the title Victim of persecution  (33)  , and also some photographs of political prisoners, including his own son Erich. This one was taken in 1943  (34)  and this one in 1944   (35). Erich Sander, who was also a photographer, died in March 1944 after ten years in prison.
Why did I mix Sander’s images with the other sources I used for my work, which come mostly from the “beastly” side of photography? It is because the digital stretching of the images makes them anonymous and ghostly like the Etruscan “sunset shadows”?  (36)
In the same years in which Sander was completing his Antilitzt der Zeit atlas, several scientists were realizing monumental photographic bodies, following the myths of the archetypical, the whole, the pure. Professor Montandon from France went to the Hokkaido islands, North Japan, to document the entirety of a Caucasian minority: his The Ainu civilization was published in 1937.  (37-38)
This professor, back in the Paris occupied by the Nazis and where the extermination program was being set up, published a useful booklet in 1940: How to recognize and explain the Jew. In 1941 he helped to organise the propaganda show Le Juif et la France (please note the use of the singular “the” Jew).  (39)
On his side, Professor Genna, director of the anthropological institute of the University of Rome, went to Palestine, where presumably the only Semitic community that hadn’t ethnically mix from biblical times, the Samaritans, were living. Along with the usual body measurements, he took pictures (face, side and three quarters) of each one of the three hundred villagers. (40-41)  In 1938, one of 180 scientists, he signed the Manifesto for the Race which opened the way to the Italian anti-Semitic laws.
I don’t know the particular myth that led the Swedish fellows from the Uppsala University in their quest for Nordic, Baltic and Lapp “purity”, but in 1936 the excessively zealous head of the State Institute for Racial Biology, Herman Lundborg, was replaced (still, this institute was, under another name, the main actor of a program of forced sterilization which ended only in 1975).  (42)
In contradiction with the heaviness of this subject, I chose to reproduce the stretched images on a silk fabric, which is very light and flies with the least breeze. It makes a row of banners or flags, whose movements have a festive side. But I prefer to show them at night and under artificial lighting. I wanted these frail pieces to signify the immanence of the past and our responsibility before it: hic est historia.   (43-45)

“Memory and immigration”   (46)
In the wake of the presidential elections in France, in May 2012, during which the right-wing Front National party, known for its xenophobic views, captured one-third of the votes in rural areas, a group of teachers from a high school in the Camargue region near the city of Nîmes applied to the regional school district to set up an artist-in-residence program devoted to the theme of “memory and immigration.”
Once I installed my studio in an empty classroom and began discussing with the students, I realized that only four out of twenty-eight of them had no foreign origins (which means, just as an afterthought, that several of their parents of foreign origins voted for a xenophobic party). I asked the students to find family pictures, or to take photographs of relatives or neighbors who had been or were immigrants. Each student, then, had his or her picture enlarged and mounted on a good frame, the same for everyone. Each one intervened on the image as he or she wished.
From my side, I used their work for a simple installation made out of enlarged photocopies. The documents that the students brought were superimposed on the pictures I took of them, in a photo studio setting. Once in the studio, each one was asked to keep a white cardboard oval before his face. Mounted in the school hall, these images changed depending on the place from which they were viewed: outside (where the sunlight was intense) or indoors, where this same light created a light shadow behind the foregrounded subject. Sometimes an ancestor’s or a foreigner’s portrait could replace the cut-out face of the young person. My aim was easily understandable: to make the subject (which was also the bject) say: “I also could be the other”…   (47-56)

Fifty righteous  (57)
To close my review, I wish to mention a work I realised in another high school in France. I was invited to intervene, along with the history teacher, on the matter of “the Righteous,” the persons who, during the Second World War, accepted to shelter or protect persecuted Jews. Their names (about four thousands for all of France) are listed in the Yad Vashem garden of the Righteous among the Nations, in Jerusalem, and in the related database accessible on the Internet (www.yadvashem.org).
Starting from the simple consideration that, if questioned, these persons would answer that they “would have had no other choice,” and lingering around the idea of a “banality of the goodness,” I decided to transform the found portraits of the southern French “Justs” into flags, public signs that would be at the same time festive, enigmatic, and transparent. You will notice how the stencil technics I applied doesn’t go without recalling the most iconic image of the hero, Che Guevara. (58-65)

SP, 2013-2015

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