Hidden in the details by Elisa Medde
The beginning of critical elaboration is the awareness of what really is, that is, a "knowing yourself" as a product of the historical process that has taken place so far which has left in oneself an infinity of traces accepted without benefit of inventory. Such an inventory must be made initially.
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. 2, p. 1376
There is something deeply reassuring about looking at artifacts from the past, especially older ones. On the one hand, we become children again for a moment, feeling once again that feeling of discovery, and wonder as if we were the ones who had dug and found those objects. On the other hand, they allow us to defuse our intellectual performance anxiety. Although I can (perhaps) recognize a Minoan decoration, a Phoenician glyph, such artefacts are the epitome of indeterminacy, with all due respect to everyone. We allow ourselves to admire them without necessarily understanding their essence, happy to read a short caption that says: “Fragment of vase, sec. VI B.C.". They are pieces, traces, signals of something that we cannot fully understand but on which we can speculate, study, assume, research, collect in order to satisfy that need for discussion of ancient things that spans the centuries, and in different ways continues to influence and redefine our present. Like every discourse, it also evolves with time, an expression of the contemporaneity that expresses and develops it. It is no coincidence that, cyclically, we find someone lost when faced with the sensation that the past is no longer what it was once.
It is important to notice how the indeterminacy of these artefacts, and even more so of their reproductions and representations, is at the same time anchored in their taxonomic classification. I have no reason to doubt that this piece of clay is a “Vase fragment, sec. VI B.C." – but at the same time I am forced to imagine what is behind that, the possible scenarios of use, the hands that made it, the liquids contained in it – on the basis of information that are also fragmentary and sometimes approximate. What if it was later discovered that this fragment was not actually a vase, but a funerary urn? And if that fragment was actually produced recently, and not dating back to the 6th century. B.C.? What if the photographs accompanying this fragment, its reproductions, have been manipulated or altered? A fake object? Museum classification and presentation, and photography, which is at the same time its creator and vehicle, are the determining factors of the Historical Narration understood as unique and shared, while this Narration is what determines the passing on of the cultural legacies that characterize us. Moreover, photography, thanks to its erroneous presumption of adherence to reality, was proof and evidence, a forensic guarantee that this was, and that has been decisive in the creation of cultural history accompanying the discourse on ancient things.
The works of Giulia Parlato and Giovanna Petrocchi, included in this exhibition, address precisely the responsibility and the role of photography in being a factor of multiplication of history, instead of a tool to defuse or reduce the indeterminacy of the past.
Under the title Collateral Histories, works from three distinct series are presented, which find unity in the contingency of the presentation. Alongside works from the Diachronicles series (2019-2022) by Giulia Parlato, and Magic Lanterns (2020 - ) by Giovanna Petrocchi, there is space for the series that gives to the exhibition its title, Collateral Histories (2020 - ), which is the result of the collaboration between the two authors. The variety of media and visual approaches chosen by the authors only confirms, apparently by contrast, the cohesion of their research - both individual and collective. Through analogue photography, collage and mixed media, sculpture, the artists question, and ask us, about the visual politics and ways of looking that inform our knowledge, and construction of the past.
In Diachronicles, Parlato questions the potentiality of memory, its lack, and the complexity of the very existence of a possible objective reconstruction of history. By representing and staging research, archive and collection sites belonging to various museum institutions, the series, as a visual investigation, oscillates between documentation and story, addressing the concept of fake in the museum and historical context through its presentation and representation. The images interrogate the concept of evidence, its fragility, amplifying the cracks that undermine its conceptual paradigms. Starting from a collection of disused emulsified positive plates from the Princeton University Art Museum, in Magic Lanterns, Petrocchi inquiries objects of museum cataloguing and the ways those are represented. Once a guide index for the museum collection, supplanted by their digitization, the plates have become a confused jumble of stories. Without context and elaboration, they lend themselves to multiple questions: What could be the new narratives of this past? What would be the paradigms to support such narratives? What are the points of view and perspectives? How could this object be part of the elaboration of a cultural history that belongs to it? Petrocchi intervenes on the plates through a process of remediation that involves assemblage and digital collage, triggering a process of metamorphosis that transform those in new artefacts.
The works in the Collateral Histories series somehow combine Parlato's investigative, forensic approach with Petrocchi's contemplative, re-mediating approach. Digital collages and sculptures are exhibited as if these were research findings or part of museum collections. The exhibited works investigate the transitions and migrations of material culture, the artifice of the context, the arbitrariness of classifications.
If making an inventory of the traces collected is a necessary and preparatory operation for the knowledge of the self and the understanding of the historical process, the acceptance of the very arbitrariness and fragility of the way in which this inventory is constructed seems to be a necessary acceptance at the basis of the whole process. This process can never be neutral, nor without opacity. On the contrary, the deep reflection on the differences between doxa and episteme, and the role of perspective in their elaboration and definition, opens unexpected scenarios of great understanding not only of the self, but of the we – and of its possibility.
Elisa Medde is a photography editor, curator and writer. She has a background in Art History, Iconology and Photographic Studies, and currently serves as a lecturer for the Photography MA at ECAL, Lausanne, Switzerland. Medde has nominated for prizes and chaired juries, including the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award, Prix Elysée and MAST Photography Grant on Industry and Work, and her writing has appeared in FlashArt, PhotoEye, Time Magazine, Foam Magazine, Something We Africans Got, Vogue Italia / L'Uomo Vogue, YET Magazine, the Aperture PhotoBook Review, the British Journal of Photography and artists’ books. Between 2012–23, she served as Editor-in-Chief of Foam Magazine, twice the recipient of a Lucie Award for Best Photography Magazine. She is the recipient of the Royal Photographic Society Award for Photography Publishing 2023.
