GIORGIA PIFFARETTI

FAMILIARSCOPE QUESTIONING THE FAMILIAR WAY OF SEEING THE EVERYDAY, TO ENGAGE WITH NEW LAYERS OF MEANING

Giorgia Piffaretti is a Swiss audio-visual artist. She graduated with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the HKB (Hochschule der Künste Bern), where she mainly worked with video, reflecting on the relation between reality and images. In the following two years, she continued working on independent and collaborative projects. Moreover, she was involved with a group of artists in the organization of a shared Atelier as well as living and cultural space (Schwob-Haus, Bern). Moving across fine arts and film, she participated in several exhibitions and independent film festivals. Her projects are based on an archival praxis, including different media - objects, pictures, drawings and moving images.

g-p@gmx.ch

* familiarscope /fˈmɪlɪəskəʊp/ noun noun: familiarscope: plural noun: familiarscopes

An optical instrument used for viewing details in common elements, such as images, objects or situations and reconsidering the relevancy of what at first sight could appear banal. Its mechanism works with distance (as it first creates a defamiliarisation to the observed object) and subjective projection, allowing a shift in re-considering what is perceived. More than an object, it is an attitude that just needs to be activated.

The relation between inside and outside, the exchange between subjective perception and the external world, is an essential drive in my artistic practice. It steers the desire to investigate the hidden side of the visible, and play with the invisible but nonetheless imaginable. An object, a place, or something external and tangible are the starting points for a project, triggering and provoking my imagination, and therefore a creative process. In that sense, it is important to point out that in my practice I focus on observation, instead of on inventing something out of nowhere or developing a project from a pre-existing concept. The crucial aspect which characterises my works is recognising a potential in the unspectacular and in everyday experiences.

The starting point is the moment in which the familiarity of an object is questioned, creating the possibility and the necessity to re-establish a new, conscious, relation with it. Changing positions brings one to oscillate between the familiar and the no-longer familiar, initiating a movement that generates a space ‘in between’ where new connections can be created.

That’s why my method is based on a constant process of positioning and repositioning towards the observed object. This constant movement might explain the desire to work with my own personal archive as a source of reflection, and to re-contextualise the meaning of images, objects and anecdotes, as they are profoundly familiar and therefore especially eligible for defamiliarisation. This process of defamiliarisation happens by investigating how such ‘inside’ (familiar) images, objects and anecdotes occupy a place in the ‘outside’ world. Can they offer an alternative and subjective entrance point to address bigger phenomena or history? Can they become part of a larger context or specific circumstances and thus enable various connections to be traced or imagined?

I see the personal archive as a way of communication, a micro-world that reacts and creates a bond with the outside world. By taking a personal and human-sized scale, my attempt is to tackle the question of how we create meaning with our subjective observation of the world: what kind of elements inform us and how?

In that context, filming plays an important role, since it reflects and accompanies the process of researching. Instead of an execution of a task or a representation of an idea, it is first of all a direct consequence of observation. The framing is the result of focusing on a certain aspect in a specific moment, that is analysed afterwards in the process of archiving and editing. Rather than being focused on the aim of the final production, filming is a record of a situation - allowing unexpected elements to become relevant or creating the conditions for new encounters - and a way of thinking through framing and reviewing.

In that sense, filming is an action to develop a certain understanding, which needs to go through a specific process of distancing and reconnection. Looking through my own archive of recordings, I gain an experience of the process, discovering my intentions and positions, and imagining dimensions of the recorded images. This invites the spectator to engage with this development of unfolding layers of meaning, taking part in the thinking process and reconsidering the initial perception of what is observed.

(proposal for an installation / development of a series of video essays)

The case study of this research revolves around the newsstand of Gaggiolo (IT), built a few meters away from the Swiss-Italian border. I’ve known it since I was a child, when I started visiting it routinely to buy Italian magazines. This ritual became more and more sporadic since I moved away from Ticino, the Swiss-Italian canton where I was born and raised. Last year, with more distance, I started to notice its peculiarity. Besides its closeness to the border, and the elliptical futuristic design from the 1950s, this newsstand seems to have remained the same forever, while at the same time all the newspapers and magazines are daily renewed, and the composition of their display is built up again and again. I started to see it as a live installation that is being composed and disassembled everyday, preserving its image, but updating its content. From that moment on, a process of observation and interaction began, questioning the familiarity of my previous way of perceiving it. By filming there and collecting material related to it (pictures, notes, drawings, imaginative interpretations of it), I came to transform it in a device with multiple functions, that allows one to see and reinterpret its features from different perspectives. The display and narration/ montage of the collected archival material invites the spectator to dive into this experience.