The lab Inner Landscapes – curated by Sara Alberani and Larisa Oancea – was designed as a practical exercise of reverie, a visual flow of objective and subjective narratives translated into words and photographs. Challenged by continuous inputs, both literary and cinematic, the participants have been involved in a flux of introspective reflections and practical exercises, building up a subjective mapping of their provisory shelter: Casa Cafausica and its surroundings. The one-week lab has been enriched by readings, film screenings, walkscapes, shooting sessions indoor and outdoor, full sharing and immersion.
During the lab, five distinctive photographic projects took shape. Each of these explored the topos between the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary from different perspectives. Haunted by the ghost stories recurrently told by the visitors of the house, Fabio Valerio Tibollo created an ethereal photographic project by playing on the verge between presence and absence, in four different compositions which literally re-enacted the “spirit” of the place. Simone Massafra inquiered the symbology of the tears (lacrime/lac) in an in-depth research of both the local stories and the visual culture at large. Taking her inspiration from one of the texts proposed for the lab – “Fictions” by Jorge Luis Borges – Michela Palermo focused on an infinity of suspended time-spaces, analyzing through her serial diptychs a vertiginous “network” of divergent, convergent and parallel times. Federica Porro pushed the limits between figurative and abstraction in a fluid cartographic project combining physical and emotional stains with an impressive arsenal of imaginary maps. By mentally projecting their own inner landscapes on the ceilings of the house, the artistic duo Simona Saggion and Paolo Paganello recreated their intimate constellations in a mazy myriad of threads linking the different poles of their convergences and divergences.
The five serial photographic projects developed during the Inner Landscapes summer lab will be published in a choral limited-edition book in 2019.
Participants: Simone Massafra, Michela Palermo, Federica Porro, Simona Saggion & Paolo Paganello, Fabio Valerio Tibollo.
Additional participants in the activities: Deborah Bosshart, Jessie, Giorgio Coen Cagli, Valerio Del Baglivo, Giovanni, Paulo Scharlach, Peter Tichodroma, Mavi Veloso.
Bibliography
Gaston Bachelard, La poetica dello Spazio, Bari, Dedalo, 2006.
Roland Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble. Cours et séminaires au Collège de France (1976-77), Paris, Editions du Seuil, 2002.
Roland Barthes, La camera chiara. Nota sulla fotografia, Torino, Einaudi, 2003.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Il giardino dei sentieri che si biforcano”, in Tutte le opere, Milano, Mondadori, 1984, pp. 696-702.
Francesco Careri, Walkscapes. Camminare come pratica estetica, Torino, Einaudi, 2006.
Gilles Clément, Manifesto del terzo paesaggio, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2005.
Mircea Eliade, “Il simbolismo del centro”, in Il mito dell’eterno ritorno, Roma, Edizioni Borla, 1966, pp. 27-39.
Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Garden, Thames & Hudson, 1995.
Marshall McLuhan, Il paesaggio interiore, Milano, SugarCo Edizioni, 1994.
Filmography
James Crump, Troublemakers. The Story of Land Art, 2015.
Jean-Luc Godard, Adieu au langage, 2014.
Peter Greenaway, Windows, 1975 (short-film).
Larry Gottheim, Fog Line, 1970 (short-film).
Derek Jarman, A Journey to Avebury, 1971 (short-film).
Peter Weir, Picnic at Hangig Rock, 1975.
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