Elements
by Fulvio Orsenigo
portfolio shortlisted call 'URBANAUTICA INSTITUTE AWARDS 2020', 2020
Category: Representations of Space, Architecture, and Conflicts
There is something in the images that returns relentlessly identical in the multiform variety they present and represent. Perhaps this is the reason why I sometimes have the feeling that photographs always repeat themselves, that they are but the occasional variation, the recombination of the same few elements of a primary and transparent architecture that escapes our gaze. We produce images incessantly and have no doubts about the difference between an object and its image, but when we try to define what that difference is, object and image overlap and finally coincide. The image, let's say, is a representation, something that stands for something else, but what "this something" is, always escapes and sinks into the something else it represents. "This something" is the theme of Elementi, an investigation into the nature of images. It attempts to identify that primary and transparent architecture, embedded in the visual scene before our eyes, through a path of regression from objects as we see them, to the pure visual material from which they are constructed. Regression occurs through surveillance of the patterns that automatically associate recurrent configurations of stimuli with predetermined meanings. The photographs resulting from this approach are not called upon to testify or narrate something. Still, they show the visual properties detected by our eyes before the perceptual process associates them with meaning, and thus with a fixed object once and for all. They aim at transparency to render in that transparency, not a given external world or subjective mental projections, but that in-between world oscillating between what is no longer already the origin from which the signals that stimulate our eyes come, and what is not yet what we actually see.