3rd year internship Davide Sartori

Davide Sartori interned with Amsterdam-based artist and publisher Petra Stavast. Although initially Petra informed him that she is not interested in having an additional assistant, they met for a coffee and discovered that they are indeed a match.

As Davide puts it in his internship report: “I like works which are not that easy to grasp, works that are challenging the viewer, and that are trying to trigger a self-reflection or a critique towards a story.” At the time Davide met Petra, she was working with another assistant on a follow-up to her project “Libero” which was finished 15 years ago. In the following paragraphs, Davide will give some insights into his internship and his collaboration with Petra Stavast.

During the course of the internship, I worked and helped Petra with different sections of her current project about a house in Italy that was inhabited by Concetta. As Concetta was not only the sister of Petra’s former subject Libero, but also a photographer, Petra discovered a lot of material like personal archives, glass negatives, and painted backdrops. The images and prints show slow deterioration and organic transformations.

We scanned the negatives carefully and started creating compositions of the archive. We spoke about the overall idea for her new exhibition, and we made tests on how to display the material – both physically and through video. I was mainly doing different kinds of animations to combine her photography, with the archive, and the interview material. In order to come up with a conversation around this massive archive, we had the idea of trying to find the people mentioned in the archive material, to bring the memories back to their legitimate owner.

Part of the rescued material consisted also of old letters sent from Libero to his family. My task was to transcribe in Italian first and then make an English translation. This was more complicated than expected, since the Italian they used in the 40’s was quite different from contemporary Italian.

A big part of Petra’s practice consists of photography and she only (or mostly) shoots analogue. Petra had the idea to print some of Concetta’s negatives. After deciding what size would fit best in an exhibition, we went to Aap-Lab, a printer in Amsterdam. I had the opportunity to stay with the printer in the darkroom and to get some information regarding the process, follow him during the printing and help out with taking the focus.

I had a beautiful internship with Petra, the environment felt always positive and allowed us to really have conversations about the work. I developed a better understanding about how to build an exhibition, also from the conceptual side. I can say that I feel more confident about my work and more eager to experiment. Before I met Petra, I always felt that it was a challenge to merge different visual styles. She also allowed me to interact and check out emails from her publishing house Fw:Books. This was very helpful to get an idea of how to fund your work and to understand how things work within a non-commercial field. I am looking forward to staying in touch with her and to having conversations about our work. It was also inspiring to see someone being able to lead a wonderful life without having to sacrifice it to succeed.