Take Me to Live With You, an interview with Sonia Lenzi

Teri Walker interviewed Sonia for WE ARE Magazine.

Photos by Sonia Lenzi

©Take Me to Live with You - Interior IV, Eugenio

Sonia Lenzi is a photographer and visual artist. Her artistic practice adopts an interdisciplinary approach and revolves around interrelated themes concerning identity, memories of people and places, mortality and gender. She uses photography to investigate, establish and recreate social relationships through signs, symbols and gestures. She graduated initially in Philosophy at the University of Bologna, then from the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts with a degree in Painting, finally graduating in Law. Her photographic project, It Could Have Been Me (2015), was shown as an installation at Bologna High Speed Railway Station and presented at MAMbo, Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. Lares Familiares was performed in Naples and first exhibited at the ArchaeologicalMuseum(2016),andthenattheItalianCulturalInstituteinLondon(2019).

Last Portrait was presented at the Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths College, University of London (2019), and Take Me to Live with You has been exhibited at Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, Oregon (2021). Sonia lives and works in Bologna and London.

©Take Me to Live with You - Interior II, Francesco

WIP: Thank you Sonia for taking the time to speak with the RPS WIP. I see that you studied Law and Philosophy at university before the Academy of Fine Arts. Why have you pursued a career in photography?

Actually I trained as an artist at art college and then I decided to study philosophy at university as I was interested in a theoretical or conceptual approach to art. At the same time it was possible to attend the Academy of Fine Arts. My interest for law came later: it is fascinating to study how society is framed into rules.

I have always photographed, but I started to dedicate myself to photography nearly ten years ago when I realised it was the tool for reflection I have always been looking for. It is inevitably about our experience and relationship with the world, so I see it as an existentialist tool; a way to explore and investigate the meaning of life and how our lives are all tangled.

WIP: How would you describe your work?

I have an interdisciplinary approach and I am very much interested in how photography works as a metaphor of our relationship with reality - the phenomenological world. To put it into Hannah Arendt words, in The Life of the Mind: “In this world which we enter, appearing from nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide” .

I am more concentrated in the process than in the single images themselves: sometimes in conveying a meaning through a combination of images and texts; or in a sequence that I can create in a book or in a space; or by involving in this process individuals or communities. The documentary mode, or conceptual documentary mode, is another way to define my practice. History, as we know, and experience, are a construction and so are often single documents of what we see. You have to put them in a context to make them work.

©Take Me to Live with You - From Tryptic II, Giancarla

©Take Me to Live with You - Interior II, Giancarla

WIP: Your Last Portrait is a beautiful and moving project described as ‘reinforcing relationships between women’ . Can you tell us more about how this project developed?

The question I started the project with is: how would we like to be represented and by whom (especially when it comes to what can be defined as our ‘last portrait’; the one chosen for the tombstone, in Italian cemeteries)?

The pictures placed on tombstones represent us forever, in a way. In a feminist perspective, I imagined the choice of how a woman wanted to be represented was made by another woman; building and reinforcing the bonds between women by a narrative based on a reflection on our relationships as women. Each of the imaginary women who chose the picture says something about the other woman, who was her mother, grandmother, daughter or even just friend or lover.

We sometimes don’t know who the ‘chooser’ was in terms of familial relationships. I often present this work in a performative way, such as public readings where women are asked to choose a relationship and develop the narrative behind it. I went to five different Italian ancient cemeteries and I found the images on tombstones. So the pictures are ‘portraits of the last portrait’ . Then I wrote the texts.

WIP: You have published a number of photobooks, each using a different format. How do you approach these projects and what influences the final look and feel of each book?

As I said, I believe photographs work in a context and books can also travel more easily than exhibitions. They are physical objects that you can hold in your hands, take to bed with you, use as manifestos, or display as an exhibition themselves if they have detachable parts. They are also democratic objects as they are usually affordable and collectable too. They give food for thought not just about single photographs, but about how a photographer interprets reality through photography.

Culture has always been disseminated through books and it was a woman to publish the first photobook: Anna Atkins Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853). The internet plays an important part in how understanding is shaped, but I believe that since we are physical human beings, we need to deal with physicality to understand better. We need objects.

Take Me to Live with You - Exhibition - Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, Oregon

WIP: Your latest photobook Take Me to Live With You has recently been published. Please tell us more about your book and how this project came to be.

I have always loved visiting the houses of others and imagined living in them. When my father died I decided to look for him in other houses; the ones of people who could have been the same age as my parents and were close to him or to the values we shared, such as civil and women’s rights, justice and democracy. We can’t afford to lose these values as we can’t afford to lose those people. I have involved in this narrative people who are part of the collective memory of Italian society, having joined the partisan movement, feminism, culture and politics and the fight against terrorism and the Mafia. It is a meditation to pass on to future generations, seen through houses and objects that belong to these people.

The project was exhibited last December at Blue Sky Gallery, the Oregon Centre for the Photographic Arts, and the book has been just published by Kehrer Verlag.

As Roberta Valtorta writes in her essay: it is a “process of mirroring between people, regarded not just only in a psychological, but also in a social and ethical sense, and on the concepts of identity, family, memory, and even death. Sonia Lenzi has been building for years her photographic projects, which are mobile, open, and subtly marked by the principles of participatory art, or at least of art based on relationship” .

The seven participants form an elective family, set in the foreground of a personal Italian history. To underline this, the book cover and end page papers remind one of the colours of the Italian flag, but in a different shade.

I also produced a special limited edition of prints to mark the occasion of the release of the book, which are a way to support the project and participate in it. The prints will be unique and feature the people I asked to take me to live with them and a detail of their homes. The prints come with a copy of the book. At the moment they are available at Blue Sky Gallery and Choisi Bookshop in Lugano, Switzerland or please contact me about them at info@sonialenzi.com

©Take Me to Live with You - Still Life II, Suzanne

©Take Me to Live with You - Interior I, Giancarla

WIP: What’s next for you? Any new projects in 2022 that you can tell us about?

I am working on several projects, but I can certainly tell you about another book that will come out soon by Artphilein Edition. It is about the desire to communicate with young generations, seen from a mother's prospective this time, instead of the daughter’s prospective, as in Take Me to Live with You. It is focused on young women experiencing difficulties related to gender appearance, which they may not yet be fully aware of.

At a certain point in life we lose contact with them and we would like to establish again a relationship. I looked for my daughters through other young women, projecting this desire on other young women I met along the Regent’s Canal in London. I wish I could protect them from the difficulties they inevitably will have to face.

But I don’t want to anticipate too much about it, as I hope to have the chance to talk with you again after the book will be published, in the Spring. Its title is Looking for my Daughters. A book of Love and Worries.