Interview Silvia Mariotti

Photography

The first language I used as an artist was the pictorial one and, in general, I have never looked at reality through the eyes of a photographer. What appeals to me is capturing aspects of real places, and the camera allows me to do so. At the same time, it allows me to convey the image by emphasising components linked to a more intimate dimension. According to Sartre, the image is not a thing, but rather an act of consciousness. The image, therefore, is not given with the consistency of a real fact but is resolved through an intentional process: it is a relationship whose poles are the consciousness and the object towards which it transcends. The choice of a specific type of light allows me to maintain a constant reference to the nocturnal world; the dimension of the night particularly fascinates me, because within it we force ourselves to have a closer and deeper look, and it is in this determined time interval that the light manages to show and enclose something at the same time. It is essentially a work on the passage of time, a time that is slow and dilated, and that reveals the nooks and ambiguities otherwise not visible.

References (art, literature, music, other)

I think of the notes of Erik Satie, Yann Tiersen or Max Richter’s On the Nature of daylight, and then Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Neil Young, who have always followed me throughout my education, and also Antony and the Johnsons with their song Twilight, Goldfrapp’s album Felt Mountain. I run through the images engraved in my mind and I think of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Tree of life by Terence Malick and Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. Then comes The Eclipse by Antonioni, Dino Risi’s A difficult life, Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry. I search through my memory again and I pick up Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium and Cosmicomics again, I remember the work Scogli di zinco, inspired by Calvino’s first cosmicomic, The Distance of the moon. I then look through Ungaretti’s poems; thanks to him, I was able to create my artists’ book De uma estrela à outra. I think back to his years spent in Brazil, but also those during the war, and Jeff Wall’s Dead troops talk comes to mind. Another Pindaric flight leads me to Clarice Lispector’s stream of consciousness with Água viva, and then in another direction to Eleonora Marangoni’s Lux, suggested by a dear friend who opened me up to the extreme delicacy of this impalpable world. The punctum theorised by Roland Barthes has obviously elicited various considerations on my work, and so did Susan Sontag’s essays on photography, as well as Luigi Ghirri, especially with the images collected in Colazione sull’erba (Breakfast on the grass), a series of references to the natural world and the household. I turn away once again, going back in time to look at the paintings of the Romantic painters of the 19th century, and I hear Chopin’s Nocturnes. Francesca Woodman, with her profound dissection of the intimate sphere, has been fundamental in my transition from painting to photography. I then think of Belgian photographer Dirk Braeckman, whose photographs cannot be grasped at first glance; maintaining a scale of dark greys in his work that he prints out of focus, he eliminates part of the information that, as he states himself, takes away the essence. At the border between concealment and revelation, he seeks to depict the unrepresentable. There, I would say that these scattered thoughts and images are part of what lies behind my eyes, in my being an individual trying to carry on my own research – a research that is simultaneously human, existential, and artistic. Some of these influences are immediately identifiable within my works, while for others the suggestion is only the cue, the incipit for something that can then also evolve in the opposite direction. Because I believe that, sometimes, backtracking can lead to an unexpected path.

Research methodology

My research develops through the stratification of elements drawn from history and literature, as well as cultural and social symbols evoking a sense of unreality, suspended between mystery and marginality. Through photography and installation artwork, I return to the image the suggestions and the experiences lived, telling of ambivalent, mostly nocturnal worlds that generate a sort of temporal suspension and simultaneously pave the way for new interpretations. The transition I am making, from capturing the reality to creating fictitious images, slips continuously through scenic installations, photomontages, dream-like dioramas, and the modelling of three-dimensional shadows. Each time, I try to bring to the audience an altered dimension of reality, or reality itself, that shows how variable, deceptive, charming, it can be.

Artistic crossovers and contaminations

I like to think of going beyond the two-dimensionality of the photographic image, making the viewer’s experience as pervasive and concrete as possible, giving the opportunity to create a universe that is even more personal – insinuating, into the mind of others, suggestions, clues that do not reveal everything immediately but that allow a glimpse of other opportunities. Therefore, I imagine shadows and projections, until I turn them into sculptures, undefined shapes, at the border between reality and fiction. They are literally portions of images that, from two-dimensional appearance, I turn into real space again through a structural reversal: the sculpture gives fullness to what was once empty in the picture. (Nocturnal volumes). Or I think about the potential of a material, and I transform it from an everyday object to an image. I also use objects, as if they were photographic papers, to print an image on their surface, thus conveying the idea of an instant and a place, and getting as close as possible to the suggestion of that given moment. (Faded garden). I like the idea of creating real scenic settings; investigating the possibilities that develop in the mind, in the imagination, and trying to stay as close as possible to these visions.

 

 

 

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