“And he knew, on the other hand, that there is no more effective way to break the spell of tradition than to cut out the “rich and strange,” coral and pearls, from what had been handed down in one solid piece.” (1)
One. Findlinge.
(1990 Potsdamerplatz)
There is a German word with two significations: Findlinge. It means both erratic rocks deposited by glaciations in territories of a different geological nature, and foundlings (Italian: “i trovatelli”). This multiple definition does not exist in French or Italian, although it does refer to an object found in a place where it does not belong, as well as an abandoned being who is taken in and adopted.
Tourists and travellers strolling through Berlin after the fall of the Wall (November 1989) might have stumbled across a gigantic flea market in the Potsdamerplatz district, which had become a huge wasteland after the bombings of the Second World War. It seemed as if all the inhabitants of East Germany had gathered there to sell off their few possessions and, above all, their own history. You could buy Soviet signs, old sewing machines and bicycles for pennies on the dollar, but above all, lots of paper documents and family photos. This place is where the course of my artistic work changed, and I began to work directly on the images and documents I found.
(1990-1993 Aschenglorie, Vanitas, Über die Schädelnerven)
My first major installation, Aschenglorie, was made up of pieces assembled at the Potsdamerplatz, while later ones (Über die Schädelnerven, Vanitas) were based more intentionally on archival images of psychiatrists or, quite simply, doctors. I used X-ray plates during these years. For me X-rays were at the same time a way of writing the body and a translucent negative screen through which one could guess and decipher the image.
At the time, I was very interested in the question of translation between text and image. I would always been struck by little phrases and quotations I’d come across while reading books. A short story by the Romantic writer Adelbert von Chamisso has stayed with me for many years: the story of Peter Schlemihl, who sells his shadow to the devil in exchange of everything he could possibly want but ultimately cannot exist without this immaterial thing. And also, a note by Sören Kierkegaard on “reflective melancholy”: “It is this reflective grief that I intend to evoke and, as far as possible, illustrate with a few examples. I call them tracings of shadows, to recall by this name that I borrow them from the dark side of life and because, like tracings of shadows, they are not spontaneously visible”. The Danish word for these figures is skyggerids.
(1999 Skyggerids)
Yet another work on the idea of shadows that might reveal something unexpressed. It’s based on a single photograph, which depicts a child in the 1930s in Italy, expropriated from himself, shown in a warlike attitude that he could perhaps not help adopting.
In the photographic pose (of course, every photograph “isolates” and ‘iconizes’ its subject), the child is “promised”, consigned by the adults responsible for him to the regime that will guarantee him the future in which he is thus inscribed. Here you have three variations on the theme: a child in uniform making the Fascist gesture; a child in uniform with a club; a child in uniform with a portrait of the Duce.
This tenderness in the act of placing the toddler in front of the photographic lens, which is ultimately how we take our children’s photos, is matched by a threat: this child, who is already a soldier, will be on the winning side. His uniform already protects him, while giving him the symbolic and ideological markers of his adult life.
(1995 Ninna nanna)
Two. Interlude.
(2006 Ex voto)
In this work, named Ex voto, whose obvious reference is to the walls of the Italian churches covered in metal pieces or paintings depicting an incident from which one has been saved by divine intervention, I intervene on my own drawings and documents, in the same way as on found papers. The mosaic configuration means that each piece, while unique, cannot live without the others that surround it and give it complementary meaning. The lead frame, built at the same time as the image it encircles, is one with the work. To flatly speak, I take a figurative item out of its context, to give to it another, provisional, meaning.
Three. Identifications.
(2009 Identifications)
In January 2008, a garbage collector working near the central police station in Rome found two large garbage bags full of photographs: they contained 8,000 images (of identification, surveillance and exhibits) which, having outlived their usefulness in current investigations, had been thrown away to make room, when they should have been deposited in the national archives.
The recovered images were purchased by Il Museo del Louvre, an antiquarian bookshop and gallery, which prepared an exhibition of them and passed on the information to the newspapers. But on the very day of the inauguration, the Carabinieri, mandated by the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage and accompanied by two archivists, came to the gallery to seize all the material on display, as well as the exhibition catalogs. An assistant to the gallery owner pocketed one of them, and it was from this single surviving copy that I drew – and “recovered” – six images: they probably came from the Vice Squadand, judging by the subjects’ appearance and clothing, may date from the late 60s.
By working on them, I wanted to take up the idea of a fashion show, when putting these representations, which have a certain plastic elegance, one after the other. Using chemical means, I superimposed texts taken from a syllabary for popular schools. There is no relationship between the different elements of this work, other than the one I have imposed, and other than, perhaps, the fact that these texts dictate linguistic rules.
(2009 La Buoncostume suite et La Buoncostume/Wallflowers)
I’m used to work in series, to present many variants to the solution of a formal problem I’ve posed myself. In the series I’m showing here, I’ve tackled the question of pose and frontality, which always concerns this type of image (I’d like to point out a difference here: while identity is a quality or, better still, the set of qualities and relationships that define an individual, identification is a process, the set of acts we need to recognize an individual among others).
In some of these photographs, you can see the metric grid that serves as the background for the portraits; it reminded me of the damsels who are kind of wallpapers village parties, waiting to be invited to the ball. In English, they’re called wallflowers, a term also used to describe a shy person.
I should point out that, here as in others of my series, the background, the passage of color, the incisions on the surface of the image have the function of making it permeable to other possibilities of reading.
(2010 Leçons d’anthropométrie)
This series was born of research in the archives of the Gard département (South of France). Every homeless person, especially nomads and itinerants, was required to carry an anthropometric pass, drawn up according to the standards dictated by Alphonse Bertillon (the inventor of the “portrait robot”), and stamped each time they entered and left a commune. This carnet, whose obvious aim was to control the gypsy population, was used from 1912 to 1969: in addition to personal data, it contained the bearer’s front and side photos, as well as the prints of his ten fingers.
I’ve reproduced six photos of members of the same family (taken in the early 1920s) on glass, and I have superimposed them on the articles of the passport rules; these articles are transcribed with a black felt-tip pen on cardboard cut-outs, like those shown by beggars to collect money.
There are also colors, fluorescent red and white, flattened out on the cardboard: they give geometric shapes that might bring to mind Russian Constructivism or the Bauhaus.
To confound the identification process, I superimposed the frontal photo of a person on the one of a relative, or on the profile photo of the same person.
(2011 Phantombilder)
This example of the difficult relationship with the truth of an image is the most paradoxical. I’m thinking of the German police’s Robot Portraits (and perhaps of other police forces), which can easily be found on the Internet, and to which I’ve made a slight change.
Technically speaking, these images are photographs, i.e. photographic reproductions. At the same time, they don’t reproduce anything. They are nothing more than artificially reconstituted memory. What they represent does not exist; yet we are in the presence of an image as “credible” as a “real” photograph.
These are photographic montages: whether they are digital or not makes no difference to my point. Several pieces of reality do not necessarily constitute another reality. They do, however, create a kind of icon of a face, which appears strangely smooth to our gaze, and from which something doubly disturbing emerges. To the mortifying, past-fixing activity of photography is added a kind of cadaverization of the image. This is exactly what Alfred Döblin had in mind when he introduced August Sander’s book Antlitz der Zeit, Face of our Time (to be precise, Döblin compares the levelling imposed by death to the one created by social conventions and looking at Sander’s work, he thought of the famous wax mask, much reproduced in those years, ‘’L’inconnue de la Seine’’).
Sander photography book was published in 1929.
I can’t fail to mention here another portrait Sander made of his son Erich, who died in prison in 1944, a portrait of a portrait in wax. It makes me think that photographic portraiture and sculptural portraiture are ultimately the same thing. It’s just the reproduction technique that changes.
Four. Millenovecento.
(2019 Detail of the installation Millenovecento)
A dozen years after the completion of my 2006 installation, Ex-voto, wich I mentionned earlier, and thirty years after my discovery of the Potsdamerplatz and the beginning of my work with found images, I presented a new installation based on photography. This time the installation was more decidedly history-oriented, and our common history intertwined with my biography. In this sense, I «historicize» myself as a man who lived most of his life in the past century and that’s why I named this installation Millenovecento.
I don’t respect hierarchy of images neither by the substance nor by the quality. So, I mixed good quality silver prints of my photos with newspaper clippings, photocopies and photographs from private archives. Sometimes I reproduced the image on glass and superimposed on paper documents, other times it is the photograph on paper that is the background of a text, or a graphic reproduced on glass. Each time there is a color passage, a luminescent red, which creates an offset and which is, to date, my signature.
(Details of the installation Millenovecento)
About this method of recollection and transformation : today, it would be considered aberrant what the archaeologists of the kings of Naples did when Pompeii was rediscovered in the 18th century, or what clandestine tombaroli (grave robbers) do in Etruscan burials (enter from above and penetrate from one room to another by breaking through the walls just to bring precious objects back to the surface).
Since the second half of the 19th century archaeology, even the ‘’preventive’’ archaeology that closes everything up after excavations, has been working by removing layer after layer. Stratigraphy, whose main purpose seems to be the preservation of the context of the found find, is the opposite of penetration in search of the rare pearl or, simply, of a pearl.
Five. Galatina.
(2022 Galatina remix)
I became interested in the subject of the Taranta – which in Italy is far from being just a subject for ethno-demo-musicological study, but has become a phenomenon of popular culture, both scholarly and mass – because, given my age and geographical origins, I myself could have been one of those boys watching the tarantolata from the window of the hovel.
I have undertaken the translation into French of the text by Salvatore Quasimodo, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1959, to whom Gianfranco Mingozzi addressed himself, once ready to show his documentary film La Taranta, in 1961:
The text, which refers to the writings of the ethnologist Ernesto De Martino (Sud e Magia, Milano 1959 and probably La terra del rimorso, Milano 1961), was written in less than twenty days, as Mingozzi wanted to present his film at the Festival dei popoli in Florence (January 1962, where it won the Marzocco d’oro prize).
I’ve taken up this recent series of nine small formats (Galatina 1961), using other stills of more “autobiographical” interest. It comprises twelve 30×40 cm pieces, each bearing one or two letters from the phrase Et in Arcadia Ego, written on a topographical map of southern Italy. Each painting is decorated with blank puzzle pieces, painted in fluorescent red and applied according to the Fibonacci sequence, from 0 for the first to 89 for the twelfth (as we know, the Fibonacci progression, born to calculate the reproduction rate of rabbits, considers each number as the addition of the two preceding it).
By the last picture in the series, the puzzle, which shows nothing but rather hides the image as it progresses, is almost completely filled in.
I confess that I chose this formula while thinking of Mario Merz (Crocodilus Fibonacci, 1972, among others) and the spiral shapes I’ve used in recent works (Going round and round, 2024).
Let me now briefly show another work derived from a documentary film by Gianfranco Mingozzi: Con il cuore fermo. Sicilia, from 1965. Its subject is the emigration to which young Sicilians are forced, oppressed by a feudal agricultural system and, admittedly, by the power of the Mafia.
Here the geographical map is cut out in order to show the red letters of the film title, keeping Mingozzi typeface: Con il cuore fermo. Sicilia.
(2022 Con il cuore fermo)
Six. Morbid phenomena.
(2023 Fenomeni morbosi ter 02)
I don’t know if Antonio Gramsci was ever in Urbino, but I made sure to bring him there, in image, four centuries after Paolo Uccello. This is the power that the artist has, as opposed to the historian.
This is the last work in the Fenomeni morbosi svariati series (2023). The series included three reproductions of scenes from Paolo Uccello’s Miracle of the Consecrated Host (1467-1469), commissioned by the Urbino Corpus Domini confraternity and calling for strongly anti-Semitic representations (see, among others, the essays by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (1967) and Jean-Louis Schefer (2007).
I did superimpose to the painting reproductions several holdings from the Casellario Politico Centrale of the National Archives in Rome. Among others: the manual transcription of a letter seized from an inmate of Fascist prisons in 1929, which I transcribed in 1979, when I was a daily visitor of the Archives for my research about the Roman labor movement (“Noialtri compagni semo tutti isolati aspettiamo il momento che ci venga rischiarata un pò di luce che ora vivemo nelle tenebre”); Antonio Gramsci’s identification photo from January 1935, which I transformed on Photoshop into a Che Guevara-style logo; the reproduction of the first page of the Casellario computerized index, under the heading “Political Prisoners”.
In this synthesis work that I am showing you, I have reproduced Gramsci’s identification portrait without modifying it, and I have transcribed the Roman antifascist’s message in bold pastel, respecting his grammatical errors: “We comrades are all isolated, waiting for the moment when a little light can shine on us, because now we live in darkness”.
In the imagery of darkness and light, I can’t help but think of religious persecution. I am also touched by the expression, however banal, “noialtri” used by comrade Candido from Manziana. Curiously, the automatic translators give, in French, “le reste d’entre nous”. Perhaps, through a computer glitch, there’s some truth to it: “ce qui reste de nous” (“what’s left of us”) in a time of darkness. But I like to translate it, forcing it a little of course: “we the others”, the others in us.
Seven. Ruins in the Forest.
(2023 RNF)
Già m’avean trasportato i lenti passi dentro a la selva antica tanto, ch’io non potea rivedere ond’io mi ‘ntrassi; (2)
For some years now, I have been working on the theme of nature subject to civilization (and vice versa), well knwing that, after Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture (first publication : Paris 2005) a natural space free of human vision and intervention doesn’t exist. In the photographs I make around Europe there is always a natural element that predominates over the co-presence of artifacts reduced to traces and signs. It is the concept of ”rupestrian” which interests me.
On this purpose, I went back to Dante, particularly the verses in the Comedy where he talks about the ”ancient forest”, which is nothing but a representation of the earthly paradise. I dealt allegorically with this subject of an Eden lost and not yet found; I developed it into two series of paintings, one series A and one series B, which I show face to face.
The first series presents ten digital prints on glass, in a 30×40. Through the image thus rendered transparent, one glimpses Dante’s text, Canto XXVIII of Purgatorio, reproduced on Canson paper and continuously, without a caption. This is the Canto in which the poet, bidding farewell to Virgil, finds himself in the delightful garden from which the first sinners were banished; so perfect is this garden that even animals are absent from it.
Natural element and human element are indiscernible here, merged in what could be a vision of the world after the passage of humans, a world returned to primeval forest. It is not known whether a pearl fisherman from another galaxy might find there the bones that have become corals, the eyes turned into pearls, not even by employing the anti-scientific technology foreshadowed by Hannah Arendt: perforation versus stratigraphy, in the necessary destruction of the past that allows the extraction of what is “precious and rare.”
(2023 Rovine nella selva)
In opposition to this sequence, I conceived another line of prints on glass, of the same format; in these works, the human factor is more markedly present. One glimpses mostly monumental vestiges, more “structured,” lost in nature, still recognizable though but perhaps no longer reconstructible. As a backdrop to the photograph, one recognizes topographical maps cut out and put back together: they may, or may not, trace the location of these unlikely earthly paradises.
On each map I have inscribed a letter, in Bodoni typeface: E, T, I, N, A, R, C, A, D, I, A, the last I being represented by the image of a stick painted red, sunk into the floor of the former Castro Cathedral. The last word of the famous Guercino and Poussin quotation, EGO, is superimposed to the image of a princely Etruscan tumulus in Vulci (Latium).
With this series, I try to oscillate between a certain “beauty” of the image and its admonitory character. Nothing here is spectacular or dramatic, but I think that hovers some restlessness there: a feeling that unites us and makes us “human thing.”
Eight. Monstrum nostrum.
(Histoire des monstres 00)
2021, December.
It was while leafing through an illustrated book on the oceans that belonged to one of my children, in early December 2021, that I came across, or rather stumbled upon, some old engravings depicting sea monsters. My mind must already have been on a subliminal quest for nightmarish images, since the other two books next to the bed were Monstros by Portuguese philosopher José Gil (Lisboa 1994) and Emanuele Coccia’s Métamorphoses (Paris 2020).
So, I searched for and picked up again the great bestiary by Ulisse Aldrovandi, Italian physician, philosopher and one of the inventors of natural history (1522-1605), his Monstrorum Historia. Published in Bologna in 1642, a copy of this work entered the library of the Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon the following year. Requisitioned along with other ecclesiastical goods during the French Revolution, the volume was in my hands on a table at the Carré d’art in Nîmes the day after my sleepless night.
Of all the monstrous creatures listed by Aldrovandi, I chose marine animals. They seem to me more capable of adapting to the habitats I’ve tyrannically imposed on them in my montages.
The backdrop to this series is therefore a reproduction of an Aldrovandi engraving, on which a landscape photograph is transparently placed. There is also a textual element which, without having any direct relationship with either image, is like the stitching that links the other two layers: a kind of marginalia added in the course of reading. These are quotations from authors I’ve read while sitting down to this work, transcribed in Indian ink or graphite.
Sometimes, a rectangle painted in neon red, while hiding the background image (or highlighting it), opens up an additional level for reading the image : simply another dimension.
In September 2023, invited to the closing ceremonies of the Rencontres Méditerranéennes in Marseilles, Pope Bergoglio spoke of how the Mediterranean Sea was in danger of becoming a sea of the dead: “And then there is a cry of pain that resounds more than any other, and which transforms the mare nostrum into a mare mortuum, the Mediterranean, the cradle of civilization, into the tomb of dignity. It is the muffled cry of migrant brothers and sisters…”.
In December 2023, these same statesmen to whom the pope was addressing were passing an anti-immigration law that won’t even guarantee the continuation of their power. The change of title of my series comes from historical contingency: from Histoire des monstres to Monstrum nostrum, “our” monsters.
2025, January.
In the “old” naturalist school, however, the monster has still something human, a kinship with humanity, while being the very expression of otherness. While they are outcasts, “aliens”, we, along with Ulisse Aldrovandi, seem to be able to speak the same language as them. We wonder if we could befriend them. And I also like to think that the only inhabitant of the island where Prospero was stranded, Caliban, half-man half-fish, could well be represented by one of the drawings by Aldrovandi’s engraver, Giovanni Battista Coriolano.
But what seems to me to have changed radically in the Western world over the last few decades – in an increasingly accelerated fashion – and which is undermining all the principles of the Enlightenment, secular humanism and even Christian humanism, is the conception of “the other”. It’s like a summation of the foreigner, perceived as a block of otherness and danger, and obviously considered less human than “us”.
Moreover, it seems that certain principles of the Roman Empire have won a majority in that part of the Western populations that still votes : those of a world divided into winners and losers, dominators and dominated. This is the legacy that colonialism has left us.
For over three years now, I’ve been doing ‘’photographic’’ paintings of sea monsters landing on the shores of the Mediterranean, and I’ve been wondering who is more monstrous, these fish or amphibians with humanized faces, or those who leave them to die on the beaches. I was wondering about the monstrous part of Western mankind.
This series that kept me busy for the last years was my only artistic activity, apart from my applied art productions. It also echoes the political and social changes we’re going through.
(Histoire des monstres suite)
In the Winter of 2024-2025, I once again drove along the coast of the “Middle Sea”, from Port Bou to Vietri sul Mare, south of Naples.
I photographed places I already knew in summer light. These shores look very different in winter. They are transformed by autumn storms, with all the debris and wrecks that cover them and are cleaned up as summer approaches.
I’ve transcribed texts from Aldrovandi’s work on the printed engravings, in a hasty, scrappy way: passages from William Shakespeare’s Tempest, those from Ariel’s song (Full fathom five thy father lies;/ Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange). (3)
I have also transcribed the wonderful Neapolitan translation of the song, made by Eduardo De Filippo shortly before his death and published by Einaudi in 1984: Nfunn’a lu mare/ giace lu pate tujo. / L’ossa so’ addeventate de curallo,/ ll’uocchie so’/ dduje smeralde…/ E li spoglie murtale, tutte nzieme/ se songo trasfurmate:/ mò è na statula de màrmole/ prigiato, sculpito e cesellato!
Nîmes-Farnese, Spring 2025
Postscriptum.
As some quind of conclusion and to give you the opportunity to reflect by yourself on the matter, here’s the definition of the word “Monster” given by the Treccani encyclopedia in 2018 :
A MONSTER is a being that has characteristics that are different from those that constitute the norm, and therefore generates awe and fear; its appearance is bizarre and unpleasant, sometimes frightening (it may have, for example, two heads, eyes on its chest, body of a man and head of an animal, and so on), and its size is different from that of a human. Monsters, beings produced by human imagination, can be found in ancient mythologies, religious and folk traditions, and in fairy tales and children’s stories; they can be represented as positive or negative characters, and be loaded with even complex symbolic meanings (harpies are monsters from Greek mythology; the m. of Loch Ness; monsters and villains from fairy tales)…
Quotes and notes:
- Hannah Arendt, Introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflection, New York 1968.
- Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, XXXVIII.
- Shakespeare published The Tempest in 1611; Aldrovandi had died six years earlier, well before the publication of his Historia Monstrorum (Bononiae 1642).
- A couple more quotations from Arendt’s Men in Dark Times, New York 1968.
‘‘the destructive power of quotations was “the only one which still contains the hope that something from this period will survive – for no other reason than that it was torn out of it.’’
‘’This method is like the modern equivalent of ritual invocations, and the spirits that now arise invariably are those spiritual essences from a past that have suffered the Shakespearean [48] “sea-change” from living eyes to pearls, from living bones to coral..‘’
‘’this thinking delves into the depths of the past – but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization…’’
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plaster
Private Collection
French, out of copyright
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