NATASHA SABATINI
I WANT TO DESCRIBE THE PRESENT
NOW
YOU READING ME SCROLL THE SCREEN UNFOLDING
AND IF NOT HERE THEN WHERE?
Fisarmonica. Sketch for unfolding book. Variable sizes. October 2014
Audio quote from Giorgio Agamben.
What I see in the images is a trace visible in the forms that shimmer on the surface, shaping an image of myself as a child, me, no longer me estranged and dragged out of time. It's a small detail, a carrier of information. My viewing of this information is then tangled up in recollection of a past, a projection of the present as well as imagining a future. This is translated through a continual reworking of the image. In this process of repetition there is no singular final image to arrive at each image is a whole and at the same time a link in the chain that speaks about the present, the previous and the next, a constant variable.
READING THE OBJECT/PHOTOGRAPH
IMAGE AS TEXT
Hubertus von Ameluxen in Copy, Archive, Signature A Conversation on Photography by Jacques Derrida tells us of William Henry Fox Talbot who described his invention of the photographic negative as "words of light" indicating the vicinity and interconnectivity of the image as writing. Directed as Derrida he says: "In Memoirs of the Blind you speak of skiagraphy, the writing of shadow, as simultaneous memory, a memory of the present, a division of the instant. But whence, then, this memory of the instant, whence this archive of the present?"
Installation Palazzo Ducale, Atina August 2014. Glass and photocopied paper on lights.
IMAGE AS OBJECT IN SPACE
Play Pecha Cucha
"If my human flesh can assimilate the brute flesh of a sheep, who can prevent the human mind from assimilating human mental states? Because he rethought it at great length, and endured it, the eternal recurrence of things is now Nietzsche's and does not belong to some dead man who is barely more than a Greek name" George Luis Borges, The Total Library. 1922-1986 Penguin Modern Classics
Through the making and presentation the image is affiremed as object to then be documented and photographed once more to become image again.
The work exists within a given space in a given form for the viewer to experience for a limited amount of time, yet its reformulation in other spaces and in different formats is unlimited. Walter Benjamin says in his essay Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction: "In making many copies of the reproduction, it substitutes for its unique incidence a multiplicity of incidences". This suggests in my opinion the importance of the staging of the work to re-establish its aura.
The artists Charlotte Moth, Lorenzo Vitturi, Nina Baier and Alexis Dirks effectively play with the two-dimensional print installed in a sculptural setting that increases the tensions, between the flat surface and its embodied object being referenced. Ola Vasiljeva's work is further transformed purposefully for the showcasing online, where viewing becomes an experience rather than simply a catalogue.