Urbanautica

ALVARO DEPRIT. TO PLAY AND TO HIDE

by Steve Bisson

«I would like to leave the audience the freedom to listen, which in turn produces, through the relationship with the image, a new narrative trait. One can dissect the world, transform it into an equation, fragment it into images, but a dose of mystery will remain.»

In 2019 Alvaro Deprit was finalist of Urbanautica Institute Awards. His work 'SW' was published in the catalog. I am glad to share the conversation we had at the time:
Could tell us a bit about where you grow up. What kind of place it was? And then photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

Alvaro Deprit (AD): I was born and raised in Madrid, within a large family of 12 people including grandparents, parents, and siblings. I have few memories of the city of my childhood and adolescence; the school was in front of the house and made life very centered in the family unit, and during the weekend it was regularly going to the house in the country. So, paradoxically, I have a memory more related to nature than to the city. The life in the home of such a large family is frenetic, lively and chaotic, and I always had the feeling of living in a bubble, in a world of its own. As a boy and a student I began to live Madrid in all its aspects, it was the last rounds of the Movida and I had the impression of a very fascinating and wild city. At the age of 25, I left home and move to Germany for my studies and since then I have not returned.

© Alvaro Deprit, print from the series 'SW'

After having completed high school I wanted to study cinema; I've always been interested in the image, but at the time the only real thing was a private school that I could not afford, so I started my philological studies at university. Photography, however, has always accompanied me, with lightheartedness but at the same time as something close and essential. During a long stay in Cyprus I remember having concretized the idea that photography had to occupy more space in my daily life. I think it was the light of the island that made things more clear. After two years in Germany, the places appeared to me as a visual explosion.

During that year I remember having studied and deepened photography and I traveled around the area with a 35mm film SLR. The light was very powerful, almost white, covered everything, the colors were clean and saturated. One of the first photos I remember making at that time is a very simple photograph and a very characteristic image of the place: they were lemons of an intense yellow fallen from a tree on the cement of the road. Perhaps it is for the ease of the shot, or perhaps the randomness and immediacy of the scene, which in fact I feel now closer to that kind of image and photographic approach rather than that undertaken for years in my career.

What about your educational background? How do you relate to this? Any take aways? Any meaningful courses? Any professor or teacher you remember well?

AD: I've never been a good student, escaping from mathematics to high school made me undertake the classical studies of language and literature of which I immediately became passionate. In the analysis of the text and the translation of the Latin and the Greek there is something very comparable to the editing of the images; as a kind of 'fragmented' idea, like a puzzle that you have to understand better and to which you have to give form and meaning. Furthermore, there is a fairly logical part in the order of the succession of images that has to do with the syntax.

© Alvaro Deprit, print from the series 'SW'

I continued my humanistic studies at the Complutense University of Madrid in the Faculty of German Philology and at Otto Friedrich in Bamberg, Germany. Later in Italy I followed three years of Sociology studies at the D'Annunzio University, in Chieti. I always had in mind a professor of German literature, he was a quiet and curious person and when he talked about literature he was fussy about telling details and recreating the environment of stories. He was one of those people able to enchant when speaking and to contextualize and recreate their own atmosphere. I believe literature has been a fundamental source for my way of understanding and deciphering the environment I photographed.

What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking? How is the language evolving and impacting the daily life of people and communities in your opinion? Fast interconnections and instant sharing. How this is affecting the role of a documentary photographer and your own practice?

AD: In 1977 Susan Sontag stated that the advent of ultra-fast photography was revolutionary progress because it allowed men to examine complex phenomena not in real time but at their own pace and without haste and therefore produced an amplification of our capabilities. The other day, however, I read an article that assumed an application that learns not only to suggest which of the photos we took are worthwhile to be saved in memory, but that even learn what are our preferences in the choices.

© Alvaro Deprit, print from the series 'SW'

Today we seem to have a problem of memory space, data are overloading our capabilities, which has become oppressive. In other words if before the question to ask was what to save in our memory, now instead is the opposite, what should we delete? What we would have 'right to cancel', in the sense that we are subjected to an excess of information and images that could limit our freedom to shape our identity, to be able to choose what to remember in a more spontaneous way.

© Alvaro Deprit, print from the series 'SW'

From the virtual world, there is another interesting datum that influences the memory and therefore the way of telling. The micro-narrations that we consume in the social and in the virtual in general, change the form of perceiving ourselves, no longer as a stream of consciousness but in the form of information bits that can leave a trace somewhere and where every single bit can contribute to the description of identity, a kind of fragmentation on the surface. I believe this is already visible today in the photographic approach and consequently also of new trends in visual language.

About your work now. How would you introduce yourself as an author or described your personal methodology? Your visual exploration...

AD: I prefer to play, to hide. I prefer to deal with the aspects of life that press me, eluding them instead of explicitly direct them, without setting an initial purpose but accepting the results of the action, experimenting with the possible combinations of objects. I try to create curiosity, to induce new questions. I turn around the ripples of the real wondering about the boundaries or the natural veins of objects or events (if indeed there are any). I try to choose and compose a language that allows you to enter each of these worlds, as if there were a symphony of color. I would like to leave the audience the freedom to listen, which in turn produces, through the relationship with the image, a new narrative trait. One can dissect the world, transform it into an equation, fragment it into images, but a dose of mystery will remain.

© Alvaro Deprit, print from the series 'SW'

I wonder: does the vagueness of the languages refer to how its components are made or to the spatial and temporal entities to which they refer and which are genuinely indefinite and evanescent? I believe that the photographic language allows us to create echoes, reverberations, flashbacks, the integration of the present scene with the story of past conscious experiences.

I address these thoughts, as well as the actual photographic action, with certain flexibility. I like to open myself to the environment and the context, to listen and transform myself through the relationship. The result is work that sometimes deals with issues that may appear different, but with the passing of the years, I realized that I respond to these experiences with a fairly determined vision, a common thread that has to do with my discretion, confidentiality, my irony, my contemplative attitude, my submission to the fullness of color.

Can you introduce me to the series 'SW' that was selected for Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019. What are the basic motivations and assumptions of this project? How you developed your narrative?

AD: My retired parents decide to move from Madrid to Andalusia, my grandparents' home region. From that moment begins my exploration of the region. My image of Andalusia up until then had only been created through old stories and family photographs. Thus a sort of inherited memory was formed, a fictional, mystical, instinctive and naive imaginary, made up of images from the desert of Leone's westerns, of devotion to the personified madonnas, from bullfighting, a red river and many other stories. I was interested in giving shape to all these mental impressions that I kept as a child and to understand how they came into contact with the present. A linguistic game between reality and fiction, that is between the discovery of memory and the creation of a new one.

© Alvaro Deprit, from the series 'SW'

In your photographic work, we often observe a human landscape. In the statement of the series 'Fiesta' you quote Daniel C. Dennett's 'Consciousness Explained' «Our tales are spun, but for the most parts we don’t spin our stories; they spin us. Our human consciousness and our narrative selfhood is their product, not their source». This suggests somehow that we are the product rather than the source of our narratives. How do you relate to this concept?

In the 'Fiesta' series I worked on something that I often observe in my daily life. I speak of recurring and significant elements: migrants who sell objects among the cars in the parking lots. Standing still in a hard flat space that can be extremely cold, or hot as the metal of the machines that partly fill it. On the other hand, I looked for mechanical objects, engines, that appeared in a transition phase. I was trying to reflect on the idea of identity by tracing pieces of strange hybrid identities. The external world functions as a shelving, external support to the processes of cognition (a way of unloading the workload): words simplify cognition as signals and reference points allow one to orient oneself in the world. If we did not have the ability to encode and decode symbols we would not be able to rethink the world in an alternative, abstract way, in order to live and manipulate the immense amount of data, and then observe them from different perspectives.

© Alvaro Deprit from the series 'Fiesta'

In the human subject, language is fundamental and constitutive, without it it would seem difficult to think about ourselves and distinguish our own identity. With the ability to replicate events in our mind, choose certain sequences, it is possible that the subject exists only in the intertwining of its own narrative which in turn depends on the network of external memories. I still go around these aspects, the relationship between symbol, image, and representation fascinates me; I wanted to leave the question open and share the attraction and suggestion that this path has caused in me.

'SW' is also a book published. How did you developed this idea? How the project reacts in this physical support? What do you think of photo-books in general?

AD: Last year the SW project won an award sponsored by the Madrid Region and the Ediciones Anòmalas publishing house. The award included the production, publication and distribution of 1500 copies of the book. For me, it was a great satisfaction because it also meant putting a final point on a long project, more complex and less synthetic than the others. We reviewed all the photographic material produced from the beginning, scanned images left aside, and I was able to extend and exploit all its nuances, so that all the narration and insights became more meaningful. In this sense, the photo book, if exploited well, gives a broad breath to the author's work.

Three books (not only of photography) that you recommend in relation to the project 'SW' or your photography or your interest in general.

AD: ’Il fiume della coscienza’ by Oliver Sacks, ‘L’identità' by Kundera, ‘So quello che fai’ by Rizzolatti e Sinigaglia. And sifting through Magritte's 'Writings' from time to time.

Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

AD: For the content 'A shimmer of possibility' by Paul Graham, at Recontres d’Arles. I also appreciated the installation 'An anthology' by Paolo Pellegrin, at Maxxi, Rome.

What are you up to?

AD: I'm revisiting two of my latest works, 'Fiesta' and 'It was already Thursday', in relation to a third section that I intend to produce, always following the thoughts I mentioned above. 'Fiesta' was a reflection on identity; while in 'Unto God' I am interested in the event itself. Now I would like to address the idea of a symbol. At the same time I am working on the 'Fiesta' dummy.

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LINKS

Alvaro Deprit (website)
Alvaro Deprit (books)

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