Urbanautica

WATERED-DOWN SIGHT AND APOTROPAIC REGURGITATIONS

by Steve Bisson

We return to the founding nucleus of "acting" that moves from leaps into the future, either desires, hopes, fears, ambitions. They are all scopic projections that should not get out of hand, or neither shall we lose the ability to predict their impacts.

© Carlo Lombardi from the series "La carne dell'orso"

What do the rituals hide in their shell? Sometimes nothing because emptied of any "significant" they become like indecipherable refrains or the echo of something too distant to have contours. We know that the secularization of society has accelerated the decline of traditional beliefs, which had already been "normalized" by Christianity, although they preserved their character in other guises. Such transition links to how knowledge was forged and handed down in the past through ingredients banned from scientific cuisine and a shared gesture perhaps resisting as folklore. These receipts now bound in the dictionaries of "modes and costumes" are usually evocated in the context of popular feasts aimed at weld communities around some forgotten saint or tempting food.

© "Fuoco contro Fuoco" di Alessandro Truffa. Giostra edizioni, 2022

The publication "Fuoco contro Fuoco (Fire against Fire)" by Alessandro Truffa instead takes us back to observing an ancient magical ritual to cure St. Anthony's fire, a painful skin rash caused by a virus, the same one that generates chickenpox. Through the work, Truffa raises, as he writes, "knowledge and memory, combining the oral story of the healer with a mixture of heterogeneous materials such as direct photographs related to the ritual and its homeopathic nature, selfies of the healed 'patients', archive images of the viral cells under the microscope and signatures made by the healer on the photographic paper."

© Alessandro Truffa from the series 'Fuoco contro Fuoco'

This attempt, almost alchemical, shows the possibility of emancipating the gaze and introducing the reading of an apotropaic alphabet, so rescuing the modern eyesight that is a bit watered by the need to homogenize the world.

© Alessandro Truffa from the series 'Fuoco contro Fuoco'

An example of this deviation of the "sapiens" species comes from the work of Tamsin Green, always aimed at investigating and understanding the reasons for our anthropocentric being. In an attempt to avert the French invasion in the 18th century, Great Britain began to map the entire coast to study the most vulnerable points. Experts were sent to catalog the rock formations from Fairlight Head in Sussex to Portland in Dorset. What interests the English photographer is precisely the classification system and how it can condition our point of view and perception of space. "Following in the footsteps of the surveyor I oscillate between seeking to know and name the land, and melting into aimless wandering, loosing sense of time and scale. The process of ordering the images into these pre-defined categories throws up questions as pebbles become boulders, flowing water becomes outcrop. As with all classification systems, the rules are subjective, leading to their own telling of the story."

© "this is how the earth must see itself" by Tamsin Green. Manual Editions 2021

The specificities of the rocks were treated as guiding ornaments and it is this "decorative" and objectively "superficial" aspect that Green's work question in order to lead us to reflect more generally on our "military" and sterile representation of the world'. Or as Colin Pantall put it, "Tamsin Green’s work uses graphic representations of landscape to act as a pathway into how we map the world, how we see the world, and how we feel the world. It’s work where the distant representation of an Ordnance Survey map is transmitted into the feel of the earth, the sand, the grit beneath our feet.”

© Tasmin Green from the series "this is how the earth must see itself"

Instead, what we observe in the photographs of the Russian Liubov Volkova is the mechanical, Cartesian, and irreverent progress of landscape construction. When the human becomes small and almost disappears, the victim of an invisible plan, of a plot that engulfs it, denies it and puts it aside. These views are not only about the grotesque transformations induced by the gigantic infrastructural project that has disfigured the skyline of St. Petersburg, leaving everything around it more as it was. So tell Volkova: "Whatever innovative WHSD is for Saint-Petersburg, around it, in front of it the environment of the Russian existence stays and is formed exactly the same as it used to be formed for many years: rusted gates, industrial littered wastelands, abandoned cars and pastures are followed by golden domes, palaces and fences colored in wild optimistic colors". No, there's more. The mixed feeling is that these hallowed infrastructures serve no people, but pass over their fate carelessly.

© Liubov Volkova from the series "The Special Way"

The project reminds me of Fyodor Konukhov's work “POST-MOSCOW” which examines the notion of “post-city” in contemporary Moscow, the largest post-socialist metropolis with a population of more than 12.5M people. (Work published in the catalog of Urbanautica Annual Awards 2020).

© Fyodor Konuchov from the series 'POST-MOSCOW'

An increasingly alien progress. But sometimes technology comes to rescue nature, they say. Carlo Lombardi recalls this through a documentary that led him to measure the state of bear conservation in the Apennines for three years. About fifty remain in these lands. His gaze patiently accompanies us through a century of archival images of the local fauna and environment. And it is a journey that reflects the evolution of the conservation culture and the ethical, political, and cultural reasons that inform it. Certainly, what emerges is not a visual doctrine, but as Lombardi writes: "The research moves away from attributing human characteristics and qualities to the representation of bears, favoring a narrative aimed at instilling a doubt in the understanding of our personal relationship with wild animals, revealing how much this is conditioned by the needs and desires we have towards the nature."

Here then we eturn to the founding nucleus of "acting" that moves from leaps into the future, either desires, hopes, fears, ambitions. They are all scopic projections that should not get out of hand, or neither shall we lose the ability to predict their impacts.

Our Annual Institute Awards's contest is always an opportunity to collect addresses, ideas, perspectives, arguments, criticisms, awareness, and possibilities.

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