Apprehensions of the Material World - SACI 2021 MFA Exhibition Catalog

S AC I M FA E X H I B I T I O N 2 0 2 1 Apprehensions of the Material World

Apprehensions of the Material World SACI 2021 MFA Exhibition Catalog

Lindsey Campbell - MFA in Photography Joe Cimino - MFA in Studio Art Eric J. Frey - MFA in Studio Art Bridget Hannah - MFA in Communication Design Arais Meteyard - MFA in Studio Art Melissa Morris - MFA in Studio Art Rudransh Nagi - MFA in Photography David Neal - MFA in Studio Art Victor Restrepo - MFA in Photography Marie-France Robichaud - MFA in Photography

April 15-25, 2021 Studio Arts College International Jules Maidoff Palazzo for the Visual Arts via Sant’Egidio 14, Florence, Italy

1

Foreword Steven Brittan, SACI President

It is in the context of this fragile moment in our human history that our graduate students find themselves engaged with profound aesthetic and intellectual pursuits. They could have bemoaned the fate of this timing and the sacrifice of the usual access and mobility of working under lockdowns and Covid-19 restrictions, which curtailed freedoms we were used to. Instead, they embraced this period like no other to experiment with new concepts and produce their artworks. I observed with admiration how our students rigorously assessed how they could best express themselves in a

2

meaningful way during this period of uncertainty. Every artist made their mark. Not one made excuses for how difficult and stressful the situation has been and instead embraced the challenges and exploited this moment to produce thought-provoking work and ideas. This catalogue of their work captures the diverse nature of their research and the deep level of introspection that they experienced, represented so vividly here. My congratulations go out to our graduates of 2021.

May their extraordinary work form the foundation of a long and successful journey through their lives as artists and changemakers.

Introduction: Floating in Space Camilla Torna, MFA in Communication Design Program Director

What makes a space a place? In her thesis project, Bridget Hannah questions the human approach to urban space, by individuals ranging from short-term visitors to residents, and transforms our personal mental mapping into a collection of “Blob Maps” that enrich a collective vision of places and provide meaningful insights into places that would not emerge otherwise.

A common tool in understanding a space is topography, a description of a place that includes an arrangement of the natural and artificial physical features of an area. But the next level in the mapping of space is not through topography, the representation of where things are, but through topology, the representation of how they are interrelated. This is, for instance, how electrical circuits or drawings done by children about their families are designed: a representation of the electronic functions in the first case, or the relationships inside a particular family system in the latter.

All maps lie because they select the few elements that have to be displayed and discard the infinite others that are irrelevant to the purpose. But sometimes even accurate topography gets in the way of understanding, and powerful, simplifying abstractions prevail. From Medieval TO maps

to the Henry Beck London subway map, there has always been a parallel diagrammatic language that has nothing to do with geographical accuracy, but was designed to provide a conceptual key to interpreting reality that aligns with the way our cognition works. Beck will never be praised enough for having created a diagram of the subway system where all stations are equidistant, no matter where they are really located - connecting this way with the functional cognitive part of our brain.

Space is a common symbol of freedom in the Western world. Space lies open; it suggests the future and invites action […]. Enclosed and humanized space is place. Compared to space, place is a calm center of established values.

Human beings require both space and place.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Geographer

Urban spaces grow and develop in space in an organic way, rarely respecting a strict geometric structure. But, most of all, they develop organically inside our individual memory, with a fourdimensional and emotional representation that Bridget translated into handmade, colored —and eventually floating in AR— blobs of clay.

It is a fascinating field of research that Bridget is diving into, guided by the strong intuition that usercentered design is not only a set of processes focusing more and more on putting users at the center of product or service design, but also a point of view from which we are witnessing the dawn of a deeper comprehension of ourselves.

3

Introduction Jacopo Santini & Romeo Di Loreto, MFA in Photography Program Co-Directors We would like to be able to talk about the work carried out over the last two years by Lindsey, Marie-France, Rudransh, and Victor without having to pay too much tribute to the pandemic that has locked a cage around us over the past thirteen months.

We would like to avoid veiling with the obviousness of the chronicle, who knows how long it will last, the peculiarity of the four projects, each of which is a journey that is both individual and shared, long and tortuous. It would be legitimate not to relate their bodies of work to the current pandemic because the majority of the projects concluding this two-year period were conceived and developed independently, retaining their initial content and significance. But the Covid emergency and its globality, the fact that it could not be escaped elsewhere, has taken on the ubiquity and inevitability of

4

the air we breathe, literally and metaphorically. In addition to this, for the simple reason that four young artists have managed to live with the countless limitations of this period, from seclusion to the protracted unavailability of their studios, without seeking alibis but turning the obstacle, as often happens to authentically creative people, into a step, makes the pandemic, despite ourselves, a sort of Mozartian stone guest.

Each of them, without exception, has used photography to explore areas on the edge of the merely visible, using an indexical and iconic medium to evoke what others cannot see, simply because it belongs to their own lives and not to others. They have built a bridge, beyond the uncertainties of this veiled time, to lead themselves and others to a destination that was initially vague even for the authors.

Thus Marie-France dealt with the loss of her paternal grandmother’s memory by resorting to richly connected metaphors, such as geological erosion phenomena or the simple structure of shutters, in an attempt to translate the gradual receding of the fingers of life from one’s life. Lindsey, deviating from her documentary vocation, tackled the theme, tangential to the isolation of this last year, of untaken and redrawn images, as extracts from the memory of desires, and Rudransh tried to translate the inexplicability of the symptoms of anxiety disorder, resorting too to visual metaphor as the only possible means to offer the uninformed a matter for reflection without claiming to explain.

And finally Victor, who after an extremely difficult year of forced absence, has returned to the group to tell us through photography, as if it were a journey or a diary,

about his recovery, his desire to be in the world, and the hunt for ideas that he mistakenly thought had escaped from his head. All his work is about his awareness of being unfinished in an unfinished world, and that this, too, is beauty and a promise of openness.

The everyday nature of our relationships with our students has perhaps made obvious an effort and a creative impetus that are not at all obvious. They have conquered or developed, under the hardest conditions, the most difficult thing to find: a language and the awareness of its meaning and necessity.

For them, to quote John Szarkowski, photography has been both “a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it,” and “a window, through which one might better know the world.” And it will be so from now on.

5

Introduction Kirsten Stromberg, MFA in Studio Art Program Director

After six months into their 2-year MFA program, Italy declared a national lockdown, and the SACI MFA in Studio Art graduate students quickly repositioned and reconsidered their artistic research within these unexpected conditions and evolving circumstances. Over a year has passed, and they have continued to persevere and evolve in their research, resilient and adapting, formulating new connections, relations, and understandings of their field in spite of, and as a direct result of, the contemporary situation. Their title for their final group exhibition, Apprehensions of the Material World, poignantly reveals the multiple meanings of their current situation: a contemporary sense of anxiety as well as the ability to understand and grasp something. It addresses the materiality of their art practice, questioning our attachments to

6

the material world and seeing how, through it, we can explore other ways of being and experiencing with/in.

Joe Cimino’s work quietly subverts every form it takes, refusing to let the viewer easily consume it.

Working in time-based mediums, he invites us to extend our senserelations of the suburban everyday to focus on what lies on the edges and peripheries, revealing their untold histories and hinting at the socio-economic and perceptual implications that this shift entails.

Eric Frey’s work addresses issues of memory though archival strategies with a playful yet serious nod to bureaucratic systems that weigh the world down. Predominantly working with participatory practices, his work takes on the massive and endless task of archiving human and non-

human memories activated by and imprinted on material objects.

Arais Meteyard’s work plays with narrative forms, intentionally upending any rational relations with them, revealing the gaps in our thinking and seeing the poetry within. Approaching a vast array of subjects, from the cycles of censorship throughout history to scientific experiments on humans, Arais liberates the standard narrative to reveal the world as a place with poetic potential and actuality.

Melissa Morris’s work references ideas of posthumanism and the tradition of oil painting, reflecting on the modernist grid and the implications when it shifts and collapses. In un/doing the static states of the horizontal and the vertical, she questions these forms as interminable maps to

our world—socially, politically, and internally—and proposes re-patternings to the world around us.

David Neal’s work focuses on institutional critique, particularly highlighting the inequalities and vulnerabilities within educational systems. He sews together the relation between body and language, race and class, and oppression and humiliation in educational spaces, while offering the possibility to ‘leave the class.’

It has been a great honor to watch each of them grow tremendously in the past two years. I heartily congratulate them for all that they have achieved and will continue to do so as their work evolves in apprehending the material world.

7

8

Lindsey Campbell MFA in Photography

This work focuses on my relationship with my irritable bowel syndrome and the moments that happen because of it. Many people think that the only things that come from it are my painful symptoms, but there are also many moments in which I realize more than ever that I have strong and intimate connections with my loved ones, mainly my host mom Marta, my boyfriend Chris, my closest friends, and my parents.

Lindsey Campbell is a photographer from Atlanta, GA, currently in the MFA in Photography program at SACI. She mainly works in documentary photography with artistic work on the side. Her work involves getting to know people and their places, from the artisans of the Oltrarno to her friends and family back home.

All images from the series, In Light of IBS, 2020-21 (ongoing), Adobe Illustrator, print sizes vary

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Being Here: Lindsey Campbell’s Mental Photographs Dejan Atanackovic, Visual Artist and Writer

It was a few months ago that Lindsey began to draw her “mental photographs.” In the midst of the pandemic, forced to make choices without a choice, her mental photographs reflected an intention to deal with the moments for which it was now impossible to provide photographic evidence.

Recreating scenes of emotional intensity, sitting in a lonesome hotel room or, later, in her Florentine home (in the semi or complete lockdown), Lindsey felt the need to talk about distances.

About being elsewhere.

Lindsey, who has been dealing with a particular form of illness since her early childhood (IBS syndrome), is well familiar with the sense of being elsewhere.

Dealing with the painful syndrome that shapes her time—past, present, and future—Lindsey talks of her relationships with her surroundings, with the people who differ from each other by showing understanding or indifference.

As for us all, Lindsey’s world is her mirror. She sees herself in the eyes that observe her, and from that judgmental gaze, she draws conclusions and makes her choices. Art is one of those choices. Art is there to raise questions about all that seems to be unquestionable and rooted in the cemented world of imposed ideas. Our societies,

16

so focused on stereotypical and banal formulas of happiness, are hardly ever prepared, opposed to the proclaimed rules of political correctness, to accommodate the needs of those whose needs are different. In the midst of a global race for social approval, with the evident desire to find sense and beauty in diversity, the purpose of Lindsey’s art finds its most essential guideline: to raise questions about values, in particular those values that are opposed to the falsity of promises, values that come out of facing effective difficulty in order to reach deeply into the real structure of human relations.

The lines of Lindsey’s drawings recreate the basic shapes of memories, eliminating the irrelevant surroundings and focusing on surprisingly precise details: a face, a bicycle, an IV treatment, a hallway at an airport.

That is why we call them mental photographs, even though they are drawings; they recreate with an apparently inescapable objectivity the specificity of the moment, as though the hand that drew those few lines had no other choice. On some drawings, we can literally count the number of lines — the number of hand gestures by which the memory has been recreated. And when we do so, we observe the sincerity of one simple suggestion: Lindsey

is counting those few steps that make life good and valuable. We are, to begin with, reminded of the precious and often forgotten sense of the present. Busy with the need to satisfy the imposed and aggressive dreams of the future, we often forget how important it is to live in our own time.

There were many new sorts of distance that we all felt in the past year or so, since the pandemic began. The virus brought an entirely new set of rules of behavior, followed by new forms of silence and loneliness, but also new forms of collectiveness.

Lindsey’s drawings, discrete and silent, are all accompanied by texts, short descriptive statements, all of which talk about the normality of (her) daily life.

Drawings could, therefore, be seen as a therapeutic activity, as entries in a diary marked by a specific date, yet we know that the purpose of specifying the date is exactly to talk about any day, of any year, in a life fully defined by a far less conventional understanding of the passing of time.

Normality, here, is the key word. In the time of the global pandemic, the scenes represented in Lindsey’s mental photographs seem to acquire a particular sort of universal meaning, reminding us of one simple fact: being diverse is a fact that, to a various

extent, for better or for worse, awaits everyone just around the corner. Lindsey’s work is therefore important in several ways: as a part of a mission of a young artist to denounce, on one hand, the dominant rule of aggressive indifference, and on the other, to override, to jump over, but also to clearly mark many societal traps that we normally walk around while pretending not to see them.

In fact, all of us, at some point of our lives, become that feared Other defined by different and very specific physical, social, linguistic, economic, and political needs, but, most of all, defined by disapproval or mistrust of the majoritarian society.

When we stumble upon our certainties, even briefly, we realize that it is exactly those least questioned certainties that represent the most deceptive part of what we perceive as reality. But at the same time, as Lindsey’s mental photographs remind us, it is in those moments that we tend to expose our most beautiful, most sincere, and most truthful human characteristic: our fragility.

17

18

Joe Cimino MFA in Studio Art

Joe Cimino is a time-based media artist, focusing primarily on video and sound. His work explores histories that remain overlooked in everyday life, highlighting what lies on the peripheries in order to safekeep their traces for an uncertain future. In his work, Cimino often breaks down the conventions of the formats he uses: a series of film trailers that never amount to a full movie, a sound work utilizing the podcast format to question its own existential narrative, large scale video installations of mundane objects that function more like paintings, and editing appropriated footage from western genre films to focus on the landscape rather than the main characters. In all of these works, Cimino brings the background to the foreground asking us to see beyond the banal and to reflect upon the hidden histories of what often goes unnoticed.

Joe Cimino is an Italian-American time-based media artist, musician, producer, and podcaster living and working between New Jersey and Florence, Italy. Growing up traveling back and forth from the United States to Italy, he holds on to his dual cultural identity, which is present in his artistic practice. He holds a BFA in Studio Art from Rowan University and is currently in the middle of his MFA in Studio Art at Studio Arts College International, located in Florence, Italy. www.joeciminoart.com

Left: The Heart of the Problem (Installed), 2021, video projection and sound, 3’45” Right: On The Fence (Installed), 2021, video projection and sound, 7’40”

19

Top: The Heart of the Problem, 2021, video projection and sound, 3’45” Bottom: What if We Repeat Our Mistakes?, 2021, video projection and sound, 3’45”

20

Top (left): American Landscapes (untitled still 1), 2021, video and sound Bottom (left): American Landscapes (untitled still 2), 2021, video and sound

21

Tree 5, 2021, digital photograph, 25.4x17.78 cm

22

Tree 2, 2020, digital photograph, 25.4x17.78 cm

23

Left: The Midnight Drive, 2020, sound, 67’45” Below: The Midnight Drive QR Code, 2021, transparent QR code, 12.7x12.7cm Right: Never Saw Her Sad YouTube page and trailer, 2020

24

25

Joe Cimino Valeria Mancinelli, PhD, Assistant Director at Lo Schermo dell’Arte

Joe Cimino is an Italian-American artist - living and working between New Jersey and Florence - whose practice is mainly focused on moving images and sound.

Besides his visual arts career, he works as a producer and electronic musician.

Infra-thin is a word coined by Marcel Duchamp—impossible to define but understandable through examples. The warmth of a seat (which has just been left) is infra-thin, or velvet trousers; their whistling sound is an infrathin. Many of the feelings, sounds and images created by Cimino remind me of this fascinating yet elusive term. His work deals with backgrounds and everything that remains at the edge of our vision or experience: a western landscape, the sound of the snow falling, the feeling of a sunset, an American suburb. It blends into our digital panorama, taking the shape of an odd podcast or a trailer for a fictional feature film. It is subtle and blurred, capable of effortlessly infiltrating your Youtube playlist. By deconstructing and manipulating popular formats and images, it encourages you to notice patterns within our chaotic reality, suggesting that personal contents might be projected within mainstream architectures.

His work seems to be a series of glimpses, slowly escaping our vision.

26

American Landscapes is the latest work by Cimino. It consists of an absorbing montage of classical Western landscapes, as an accurate soundtrack takes the audience on a prothean trip through deserts, valleys, and rivers, taken from Hollywood movies. As the seasons turn, we are left wondering about the passing of time, closed in our homes, while the pandemic unfolds.

Never Saw Her Sad (2020) consists of seven trailers uploaded to the artist’s Unknown Studios YouTube channel. The charming female voiceover of the artist’s mother takes us into an intimate family portrait, made of ‘80s and ‘90s home movies. This heartfelt narration connects Italy and the United States, leaving the viewer in a state of expectation that is never fully satisfied. Watching the trailers, we remain suspended in a state between the past, told through the use of archival materials, and the future of a feature film that will never arrive.

The relationship with memories is at the core of another of Cimino’s work, also available on the web.

The Midnight Drive (2021) is a free podcast hosted online on the Italian web radio and archive Radio Papesse. Four episodes, diluted in a span of one hour, immerse the listener in a car drive through a cold winter soundscape, waiting

for a snowstorm. The artist, performing as a Radio DJ, tells us about the complex relationship between man and nature, carrying us to another surreal dimension, not distant from that of a Lynch movie.

A similar feeling is given by The Golden Hour, an installation shown for the first time at Palazzo dei Cartelloni in Florence in February 2020. In photography, the golden hour is the last hour before sunset and the first hour after sunrise, when the atmosphere is colored in different shades of red and gives us a sensation of softness. Cimino’s installation is a combination of warm colors, electronic sounds and a female robotic voice, taking place in an undefined future time where the sun has been replaced by a new technology. A hypnotic sci-fi experiment, The Golden Hour continues the reflection on artificiality and the possibility of replicating a natural experience: can we fake nature?

Four short, single-channel videos are the main characters of Monochrome (2020). Each video consists of an abstract image or a suburban landscape on which a color mask and a soundscape have been superimposed. They look like time-based expressionist paintings; relaxing fogs and opaque views capture our eyes in an almost meditative experience,

in which the seen and unseen dance a very slow choreography.

Untitled (Trees) is an ongoing series in which past and present collide. Old prints are superimposed on digital photos of the same urban landscape.

The protagonists are trees, cut and hidden in the here and now, alive and flourishing in their analog representation. A way to bring memories and stories back to life, once more Cimino uses a simple gesture to remind us of the passing of time and the ability of the human, through technology or art, to replace nature.

The Golden Hour, 2020, video installation still

27

28

Eric J. Frey MFA in Studio Art

Embrace the Red Tape. In the digital age where memory has been converted into bits and bytes, Eric Frey recaptures the essence of memory retention and transmission before the digital age. Utilizing the bureaucratic aesthetic and the practices of governmental institutions, he created a new institution to preserve and protect memories. Having built the International Mnemonic Object Registration Administration as an umbrella organization, the Administration’s Ministry of Mnemosyne collects memories that have been imprinted on mnemonic objects by humans and non-humans through this ongoing participatory art project.

Incorporating verbal, written, visual, and haptic memories that are imprinted within banal objects, the Ministry of Mnemosyne’s Memory Registration Commission methodically transforms these ephemeral mementos into precious artifacts that are authenticated and preserved within the Archive of Memories.

Eric J. Frey (b. 1974) was born in Visalia, California, and his interdisciplinary arts practice is currently based in Dallas, Oregon.

A combat veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, he retired from active duty in the Oregon Army National Guard as a Master Sergeant. He received his BFA in Art & Design from Western Oregon University in Monmouth, Oregon, in 2019, and his MFA in Studio Arts from Studio Arts College International in Florence, Italy, in 2021. www.freykunst.com

Left: Mnemonic Object Packet 0027, Prepared for Archival Storage, 2021, mixed media, 21x29.7x1 cm Above: Receiving Non-Human Memory, The Ministry of Mnemosyne’s Archive of Memories, 2020-ongoing, mixed media, installation (participatory) view, dimensions variable. Palazzo Jules Maidoff, Florence, Italy

29

Above: Archivists, The Ministry of Mnemosyne’s Archive of Memories, 2021-ongoing, mixed media, installation (participatory) view, dimensions variable. Palazzo Jules Maidoff, Florence, Italy Right (top): Mnemonic Object Processing Archivist Desk, The Ministry of Mnemosyne’s Archive of Memorie, 2020-ongoing, mixed media, installation (participatory) view, dimensions variable. Palazzo Jules Maidoff, Florence, Italy Right (bottom): Encrypting Memory, The Ministry of Mnemosyne’s Archive of Memories, 2020-ongoing, mixed media, installation (participatory) view, dimensions variable. Palazzo Jules Maidoff, Florence, Italy

30

31

Above: Mnemonic Object Packets in Archival Storage, The Ministry of Mnemosyne’s Archive of Memories, 2020-ongoing, mixed media, installation (participatory) view, dimensions variable. Palazzo Jules Maidoff, Florence, Italy Right: Redacted Memory 0020 in Codice Memoria, 2020, paper, ink, 21x29.7 cm Page 10: FS Form 404-C-1, Mnemonic Object Packet 0034, 2021, paper, ink, ribbon, wax, glue, 21x29.7 cm Page 11: Director Memory Registration Commission Transcribing Memories, The Ministry of Mnemosyne’s Archive of Memories (top) and Director Memory Registration Commission Signing FS Form 404-C-1, The Ministry of Mnemosyne’s Archive of Memories (bottom), 2020-ongoing, mixed media, installation (participatory) view, dimensions variable. Palazzo Jules Maidoff, Florence, Italy

32

33

34

35

Eric J. Frey: The Ministry of Mnemosyne’s Archive of Memories Valeria D’Ambrosio, Art Historian and Curator, Research Fellow at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia Never so much as today, physical reality is connected to virtual reality. In 1869, Henri Bergson argued that virtual life is linked to subjectivity, since each individual has virtual perceptions, thoughts, and memories, making our body the place where the possibility of the virtual lies. Matière et mémoire was written to respond to the reductionist theories that saw memory as something material related to the nervous system, by emphasizing the deeply spiritual essence of our memories. He identifies a pure memory that records the past in the form of “memory-images,” seen as spiritual entities meant to satisfy a non-utilitarian and contemplative need.1 In its virtual nature, memory allows the co-existence of past, present, and future insofar as we do not live in an isolated present.

Our life is indeed anchored in the virtual image of our past, which helps us understand our present and anticipates our actions towards the future. A virtual reality (that of memory and duration) which, although not material, is real, for it is preserved and survives in our present.

The memory of the past permeates our current lives, but it does so in a volatile, arbitrary, and uncontrollable way. Memory remembers, forgets, censors, transforms, deceives, keeps things extremely vivid in our head and obliterates others, sometimes for good. There is nothing simpler than producing and losing memories while we live; it is something involuntary and automatic, like breathing. But what happens if we try

36

to impose a rational, quasi-scientific method to control our memory in order to materially preserve our past? The Ministry of Mnemosyne’s Archive of Memories tries to answer this question by means of a highly bureaucratic system uncannily attempting to prevent nature from taking its course. What artist Eric J. Frey created, out of his long experience as a military-trained, compulsive collector affected by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, has the overall structure of a repository for human and non-human memories, which are processed through a step-by-step mechanism of collection, authentication, and conservation of mnemonic objects carrying in themselves the traces of our memories. In the long process through the offices where our memories are administered, every element is in the right place: handbooks, typewriters, stamps, scanners, folders, shelves, surveillance cameras. They are all part of a highly hierarchical and official context reminding one of the very etymology of the word archive: in Greek, arkheion refers to a house, a residence or, more precisely, to the domicile of the magistrates, the archons, those who command.

Hence, the archive is a physical place where official documents are stored and controlled by guardians, who have the duty to interpret them and the power to impose the law. 2 The creation of an archive is a representative act, a form of “memory-making” influenced by social, cultural, political, and economic factors. To put it in

Foucault’s words, to understand the archive, one has to look at the system of powers that decides what and why to archive, what information “deserves” to be preserved and the rules for its organization and accessibility.3 Hence, archives are less linear and formless deposits that appear or disappear according to fortuitous external circumstances than precise entities defined by a multiplicity of relationships regularly connected to specific events.

Through an action of deconstruction, archives can therefore reveal mental forms, organizations of thoughts, and epistemological apparatuses.

In the Ministry of Mnemosyne, Frey challenges the limits of the archive by creating an irony-imbued surveillance tool apparently leaving no room for the accidental, the arbitrary, the fortuitous trace. A tool that is nonetheless able to recover the daily, intimate, and profound dimension of our memory, and that concerns us all as it hands the responsibility of the memory selection to us. Memory is the art of the unexpected; bureaucracy is meant to kill the unexpected: it notoriously overcomplicates things that might be very simple, showing us how hopelessly complicated we are. In a consciously-accepted conceptual failure, Frey uses bureaucracy in order to rationalize the way our memory works.

What comes out is an Archive of Memories that takes the shape of an “anticipation of collective memory.” 4 Archives are extremely important in the formation of collective memory, as the organization of memory

allows a community to nourish its knowledge and gain a better understanding of its existence.

According to Foucault, the archive generates and transforms concepts, acting as a mediator between tradition and oblivion, and passing from a function of representation to one of symbolic construction.

History, understood as the passage of time, and its transmission, namely memory, are the raison d’être of the archive, but since the first is always partial and the second can be unreliable, the archive as a conceptual space is positioned at the intersection of these two entities –what actually happened and what we remember. 5 The Archive of Memories must then be experienced on a multilayered base: as embodiment of the derridean impulse to accumulate, collect, and label to remember, preserve, and relive the past; as a memento mori, a personification of memory and devotion to the past that brings with it a nostalgic and anachronistic dimension; as sublimation of time that passes.

Time that, despite its essential transience, leaves traces. Traces that, once scrupulously collected by the Ministry of Mnemosyne, will reveal their meaning in the future.

For, as Derrida argues, the archive carries within itself an anticipation of tomorrow.

1 2 3 4 5

Bergson, 14.

Derrida and Prenowitz, 9-10.

Foucault, 128.

Appadurai, 16.

Foucault, 129-30.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun.

2003. “Archive and Aspiration,” in Information Is Alive: Kraut Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data, ed.

by Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder, 14-25.

Rotterdam: V2/NAI Publishers.

Bergson, Henri. 1911.

Matter and Memory.

Trans. By Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer.

London: George Allen and Unwin. First pub.

1896 as Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (Paris: F. Alcan).

Derrida, Jacques and Prenowitz, Eric. 1995. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” in Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2: 9-63, The Johns Hopkins University.

Foucault, Michel.

1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (translated from the French by A. M. Sheridan Smith), New York: Pantheon Books.

37

38

Bridget Hannah MFA in Communication Design

How do we organize and interpret space? Understanding how space becomes place by focusing on behavioral, multi-sensory mapping avoids the paradigmatic rigidity seen in traditional, cognitively designed maps and navigational systems. The motivation for this thesis is to explore alternative methods of spatial communication and examine possible applications across various disciplines. Using a creative method of depicting familiarity with the physical world by employing tactile expression with clay or “blob mapping” proved to be an insightful tool. Additional efforts exploring the possibility of future considerations included transforming clay responses to augmented reality “blobs.” The observations made from “blob mapping” extend to a better understanding of how we navigate and orient individually and the implications of social interaction with spatial decision making and behavior.

Bridget Hannah approaches her work with an appreciation of the vitality of human-centered design. Understanding design as a communication tool, she explores function and encourages interaction through creative conceptualization. Within her unique design process and approach, she integrates an academic background in psychology and firsthand consumer behavior experience gained during her position as a flight attendant. Her work employs this multidisciplinary foundation, concentrating on interactivity between people and design. www.bridgethannahcreative.com www.blobmaps.com

Left: Gathering feedback in the form of nonlinguistic communication such as something tactile like clay is a much more insightful than a verbal language.

Right: Our brain’s cerebral cortex (the outer, folded part) processes all sensory input that you use to make navigational decisions in a smaller central region called the hippocampus.

39

Above: Blob map website and app Right (top): Blob map of my current home, Florence, Italy Right (bottom): My iPhone “significant places” compared to my blob map of Florence Pages 8-9: Collective blob maps. Blob map participant, Martin, comments on his experience in creating a blob map of the same place with his wife, “it gave us a better understanding of each other’s expectations, perception and experience.”

40

41

42

43

Above: Blob maps encourage a different appreciate of space both for those who use and design it.

Left: We have to detach from the medium we are using for navigation may it be a map, signage or GPS, re-orient ourselves in physical reality and apply the information that we absorbed to this perspective.

Right (top and bottom): Blob map augmented reality prototypes

44

45

Next Level: Reflections on Blob Maps Martin Foessleitner, Founder and Managing Director of High Performance Vienna

What is the framing of Blob Maps?

Bridget Hannah’s thesis is on design research, is not an application, and although it is quite tempting, there is no need to switch automatically into a final product, a map, or even an app.

It is a starting point to approach the field of wayfinding with a new perspective, a different attitude, and maybe even in an alternative mindset. If design claims to be a platform for social interaction, design at the same time develops its methods and principles and goes for new hypotheses. Blob Maps can work as a platform to bring other sciences into design and, even more, are essential for visualizing design methods.

Is it cognition or behavior?

In a classic way, a map serves our cognition, which is correct and logical in a functional way. In contrast, our use of space follows our behavior. This might mean that logic maps serve illogical behavior in most cases. The majority of today’s wayfinding systems are based on cognition, and for good reasons. Now, Bridget asks how design can better support and contribute to our behavior and how the motivations for using a space can be reflected in assisting media.

How is it related to mental maps?

In behavioral geography, a mental map is a person’s perceptual

46

point of view of their area of interaction. The very interesting outcome of Bridget’s research, and some conducted in Latvia, Lithuania, and Austria, shows that we understand that others have a different idea of how a dog looks, but with maps, everyone is convinced that his/her mental map is the right one. In a cognitive way, all others are regarded as wrong.

Is a map a communication tool?

Do we need a map if we are alone?

Apart from our desire to measure and organize our surroundings, it seems that a map’s purpose is communication. When and where we meet, where something can be found, remembering the location of treasures, showing new opportunities. A map is a tool to avoid misunderstandings.

It is an exchange of parameters, functionally. However, the Mercator and Peters world map is an indication that even cognitive maps are “flexible” for a common, identical perception.

What is a Blob Map? To keep it short: a Blob Map is a visualization of our mental maps. It is done more by hands than by minds. Clay as a material brings form, pressure, patterns, shapes, and even color out of our mind, even body. It is more than a 2D representation, it is a 3D++ media to express how we perceive spaces.

Speed. One of a Blob Map’s strengths is speed, not longterm analyses of behavior, but quick responses, quick doing as an indication to follow the paths. A Blob Map is also a tool of user testing. A Blob Map is like branding. Branding is a gut feeling of a product, a company, a topic.

A Blob Map is the same for a space.

Does a Blob Map bring clarity?

If two or more people make a Blob Map, they have an immediate idea of how the others feel about an area. The limitations by material and techniques automatically trigger the unconscious, show priorities, and reduce our expressions to the essentials, the gut feelings. This way, comparing Blob Maps by different people done on different dates contributes to the understanding of other people. It brings clarity to what we have in common and what we might have to re-check.

What kind of relationship does it have with an uncanny valley?

Blob Maps seem to be an excellent tool to locate, detect, and even discover the reasons for the uncanny valley phenomenon.

What parts of a building, a city, or a community are not “on the map”? Which parts are small in cognition but big in behavior? Can we discover bad areas and can we locate the good vibrations?

What is its role for Design and Science?

It is the contribution of design to research. Science strives to know more, and there is a visualization of science in design. A Blob Map lets us know more about people— where and why we/they act.

Blob Maps need a follow-up procedure: how to read them, what kind of stories are told, what kind of quality data we can receive.

Is a Blob Map still a map?

A Blob Map is a map of behavior while still mapping in a cognitive way. It is again a design challenge and task used to go for the combination of both. Bridget’s approach to start with a very rough outline of the blob area marks the location and provides a point of reference: a playground. It will need further research, prototypes, and insights to develop by design and to get clear perspectives of upcoming tools and methods.

47

48

Arais Meteyard MFA in Studio Art

Arais Meteyard works within the embodiment of nonsensical thought to show multiple perspectives in the disruption and manipulation of narratives.

She presents her own narratives as non-descriptive polysemic forms to focus on the poetics of ambiguity. Employing strategies that incorporate playfulness, chance, imagination, and abstraction, her research suggests the potential for narratives to remain outside of logic and labels, revealing a multitude of ideas towards an awareness of self in the world to create a suspended place in a suspended time.

Raised in a family of the arts, Arais Meteyard’s environment comprised the works of her grandfather Ralph Eugene Meatyard, poems by her mother, master printing practices of her father, children’s illustrations of her uncle, and the paintings of an unfamiliar relative who succeeded in London. She left home to study the ancient art of the Maya in the Yucatan Peninsula, the modern to generational practices twice in Tokyo and Kochi Japan, and now the historically prominent world of Florence, Italy.

This curiosity transverses through multiple mediums: animation, collage, painting, drawing, book arts, and film photography. Subjects of her work have included consumption of technology, religious persecution, the madness of war, human destruction to themselves and the environment, gaps in identity and consciousness, the “human,” dual mentalities, hypocrisy of government, and censorship.

Left: Nameless [2], 2020, digital prints, drawing ink, bronze pigments, size varies Right: Nameless [1], 2020, digital prints, drawing ink, bronze pigments, size varies

49

Top: This Is This installation (front view) at The Warehouse, Lexington, Kentucky, March 2021 Above (left): A Tale of NAMETAKE [3] series, 2020, paper, natural dye, ink, 55.9x33 cm Above (right): A Tale of NAMETAKE [2] series, 2020, paper, natural dye, ink, 33 cm diameter Right (top): A Tale of NAMETAKE [1] series, 2020, paper, natural dye, ink, 55.9x33 cm Right (bottom): Insect Hunter [view 1], 2021, animation, HD ongoing

50

51

Book of Ban, 2021, paper, pen, glue, board, silk, width varies depending on presentation, fixed height of 38.1 cm

52

This is This installation (inside middle view) at The Warehouse, Lexington, Kentucky, March 2021

Book of Bliss, 2021, paper, pen, glue, board, silk, width varies depending on presentation, fixed height of 38.1 cm

53

Nothingness Conquered Them, 2020, animation, HD 2’15”

Misericordia, 2020, animation, HD 2’28”

54

Fable of Days End series. 2021, acrylic paint, 76.2x76.2 cm

Insect Hunter [view 2], 2021, animation, HD ongoing

55

Perception Requires Attention Daria Filardo, Art Critic, Curator, and SACI Graduate Instructor

An artwork is a place where all histories precipitate in a fraction of a second, as Walter Benjamin tells us when talking of a ‘now time’ where all times are condensed and perceivable together in one image (that saves us). But there are artists who exceed this nature and work with a temporal dimension, proposing more than one image and creating bodies of work composed of multiple layers.

Arais Meteyard uses a narrative approach in the creation of her works, which can take the form of animations, a series of paintings, three dimensional books, and collages.

Her poetic images combine hand-painted elements with video footage, photography, and a clear line. Genres and styles from Japanese culture, Dadaist montage techniques, and Surrealist dream-like atmospheres perfectly blend and narrate contemporary urgent matters, witnessing the artist’s awareness of and participatory position in the contemporary art scene.

Personal and family memories (the artist was raised in a family of artists) are part of a larger discourse on censorship, religious persecution, consumption of technology, and gaps in identity and consciousness.

56

These urgent topics are treated with a political and, at the same time, a poetical, gentle touch. The animations Arais Meteyard recently realized are a meticulous work of extreme care, visible in every frame. The story flows without any rhetorical or didactical intention, leaving the interpretation open while maintaining a strong personal point of view.

The artist uses rotoscope, handmade drawings, black and white film photography, found images, and paint to create a collage of narrative times. Chance, irrationality, and automatism are explored in the scenes that unfold. For example, in Insect Hunter, where the aim is to enter unconscious thoughts consciously, the animation questions the reality and sanity of the world. As said by the artist: “For if reality has deemed it good to go and murder people for no reason other than money and power, then it is better to cast off this reality and accepted sanity to become, so-called, insane.” She shows her fascination for those forms of narration that go beyond the rational and relies on a flux made of many layers, which brings the viewer inside a fantastic yet very human dimension.

The narrative nature is also a cipher in the use of the painting medium, usually thought of as a

series of images, each of them independent but interdependent and forming a unique path of glowing colors, lines, and suspended atmosphere where the characters find their own place. There is a constant tension between figuration and abstraction, as well as a constant tension between influences coming from different geographical areas, such as Japan, Europe, and the United States. The family influence of the artist’s grandfather, distinguished American photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, has always been a great source of inspiration for her.

The last body of work I would like to mention is the series of three-dimensional books. The artist’s latest productions are Book of Ban and Book of Bliss, in which she uses the cyclical carousel form in large format.

Here, continual censorship and its cyclical recurrence is investigated through a form, the carousel book used mostly in children stories, that narrates a very urgent topic in our world of a continuous flux of information. Arais Meteyard builds the story with layers of drawings arranged in a carousel theater display, where the characters show us a terrible vision of the world. The artist tells us the themes of the two books: “Book of Ban includes book burning and burning “witches”; murder,

genocide, war, and assassination; iconoclasm, destruction of art, and visual images; and policing, counterintelligence, and military.

Book of Bliss includes the unthinking majority; propaganda and willful ignorance; murder and erosion of rights; educational restriction and misinformation; and constant surveillance.”

All the mediums Meteyard uses revolve around a polysemic narration that opens to multiple perspectives and include the viewer as an active and important interpreter of the work, which can lead to new paths. The apparent playful or suspended atmosphere of the animation frames, the liquid and quasi-abstract nature of the ink paintings, and the graphic and sometimes satirical approach of the drawings all bring a perfect tension and equilibrium between politics and poetics, showing the artist’s full awareness of her artistic path.

57

58

Melissa Morris MFA in Studio Art

Drawing on ideas from critical posthumanism, Melissa Morris works with shifts in perspective to re-think the notion of the human and our place in the order of things. In painting, drawing, and interventions on found images, she uses the grid as a structure and metaphor to address our systems of ordering and knowledgeconstruction, and wonders about the consequences of using the grid to build and make sense of the world. By bending or twisting the grid, what happens to our system of measure—with the human eye/I at the center—and what might replace it? Her work draws on models of self-organizing systems in nature and looks to art for its collaborative nature of building knowledge across a spectrum of time and space and beyond the human.

Melissa Morris uses the language of painting and drawing to address our ways of making sense of the world, looking to self-organizing systems in nature for the use of line and considering color a form of thinking. She received her BA from the University of Michigan, is an MFA candidate at SACI (Florence, Italy), and takes part in ongoing international artists residencies with the artist duo rosenclaire. Her work has been shown internationally and is held in private collections. www.soundingitout.com

Left: Untitled (And the grid’s heart fluttered), 2021, oil on canvas, 180x180 cm Above: And the grid’s heart fluttered exhibition installation view, SACI’s Maidoff Gallery, March 8-31, 2021

59

Untitled (Wide open spaces devoid of any sense of mine II), 2021, oil on canvas, 180x180 cm

60

Untitled (Every hue between identification and imagination), 2021, oil on canvas, 180x180 cm

61

The Measure of Democracy I, 2020, found images on paper, 21x30 cm

The Measure of Democracy II, 2020, found images on paper, 21x30 cm

In this series entitled Body Politic, images from the Western media of protests against police brutality, white supremacy, and autocratic governments are analogized with perspectives studies by JMW Turner—considered one of the first Modern painters—of geometric objects and the shadows they cast.

62

The Measure of Democracy III, 2020, found images on paper, 21x30 cm

The Measure of Democracy IV, 2020, found images on paper, 21x30 cm

63

Lines of Thinking (detail), 2020-21, black construction paper, white correction fluid, 21x30 cm

Lines of Thinking (installation view), 2020-21, black construction paper, white correction fluid, 21x240 cm

64

Melissa Morris: “And the grid’s heart fluttered” Lorenzo Bruni, Art Critic and Independent Curator

The exhibition entitled “And the grid’s heart fluttered” by Melissa Morris at SACI’s Maidoff Gallery is the dramatically lucid documentation of the condition of human creativity today. Her painterly gestures and fluid drawing, on the one hand, are the result of a reflection on the limits and deceptions of the integration between the on-line and off-line world, and, on the other, highlight how the dematerialization of reality through digital technology allows us to experience the world, human knowledge, and the other, even in the solitude caused by a pandemic. Referring to this condition when talking about Melissa’s exhibition might seem like pure rhetoric, but it is not. It is precisely this situation in which the world appears to coincide with our screens that pushed the artist towards this project focusing on the relativization of the grid, the disempowering of the symbology of perspective, and the critique of the idea that at the center of everything there is always, and in any case, the human subject.

Three clues, in particular, led me

to think of Melissa’s exhibition as an act of heroic but also ruthless analysis of the question of whether the hyper-connected human being today can truly affect the trend of world history.

The first of these clues has to do with the artist’s choice to work in painting. In her four square-format canvases are the tensions of the play between mark and color, background and abstract subject, and between the perimeter of the work and its expansion. The viewer’s eye is as if captured by the drawing that refers to a grid that is observed as it falls and implodes. There is no gravity or drama, no idea of destruction, only the viewer’s awareness of the act of vision. A sort of interactive system is obtained through the use of complementary colors, colors of opposite temperatures, which, in their contrast, cause a vibration that reduces the boundary between sign and background in favor of a direct experience.

The condition of “frenetic stasis” that emerges from the individual paintings is the same as that

65

proposed by their titles. If the “untitled” refers to the elimination of the artist’s ego as in the minimalist and conceptual works of the 1960s, the subtitle in brackets instead causes unprecedented short circuits: “every shade between identification and imagination,” “subtracting day by day,” and “wide open spaces devoid of any sense of mine.” Titles taken from an article about a blackout in the USA in 2003, Buddhist texts, and the philosophy of Josef Albers towards modernist painting.

The second clue is in the exhibition design, which seems to create a contradiction in the two types of work on display. The viewer may be disoriented in walking through the exhibition space defined by, on the one hand, the four square canvases mentioned above (works that refer to a frontal vision and to an absolute and definitive gesture and whose overall title is “Un/ Doing”) and on the other hand— on the opposite wall—by images resulting from a particular kind of drawing on black paper with white-out (a non-color designed to erase errors). The white-out is not used to hide something but rather brings out forms, structures, and memories that refer to collective mental landscapes. It is in fact the artist’s thoughts about the current situation and also in relation to the history of art and various external stimuli. It is a stream of consciousness whose title “Lines of Thinking” refers not only to the

66

individual drawings, but also to the horizon line, and to a filmic narration, seen in their side-byside placement. The display of the exhibition creates a coexistence, with all of its contradictions, between a single gesture and a narrative one, a reflection on the series and one on variation, and between codifying the world and remembering it.

Finally, the third clue comes from a work that precedes the works of this exhibition. The installation entitled “Re-enchantment” from early 2020—composed of a grid cut out of black paper, which then hangs, collapsing in the void— challenges the gaze in perceiving it as a surface, a volume, or an expanding mass. This impression is amplified by its being placed in

dialogue with an iPad, also hung on the wall, which plays a short video (on an endless loop), made by the artist herself, of an intense green Hawaiian landscape with the sound of birdsong. In this case, the observer has to deal with two autonomous elements (abstract and natural) connected by the common background of the green painted wall, which in turn coincides not with the limits of the work but with the limits of the space of the viewer. It is a work that addresses the need to not get lost in the potential places of the internet, but also to not lose oneself in the archives of the interactive memory of the digital.

Instead, she asks us to be present to ourselves and to the encounter with things, as much as with a desire for that which is undefined.

These three clues make it clear that, during the pandemic, the artist made an important choice not to disappear into the flow of the internet but also not to focus on objects, whether sculptural or of everyday life. Hers is rather a work that takes place on the painting’s surface. A statement that might sound unfair, since it could make her recent work seem to be a comparison between attraction for and repulsion of the surface, between unconscious and rational gesture, and between making the painter’s ego disappear in favor of the identity of society or vice versa. There is this notion too, but not seen through the means

of painting as Agnes Martin and Piet Mondrian in New York and Cy Twombly in Rome previously did, or the way artists like Franz Ackermann or Sarah Morris did, in a world that was becoming global and immaterial at the turn of the millenium. These works by Melissa Morris are not about the tautology of the abstract pictorial process, and for this reason the grammar of colors is deliberately reduced, even chastened, in the square format paintings, while in the others the starting point is an absolute black. Her commitment is aimed at working on the limits of the canvas as a starting point to evoke a dialogue between the beholder and the one who is looked at in the widest possible sense. At the heart of the grid is the need to regain a common dialogue and to dispense with the new censorship of humanity, which is selfimposed—a self-censorship which is due to an excess of information and not to the action of elimination, as it was in the past. Solipsistic debates lead to silence. Her intent is to lower the tone and to return to taking the measure of the space of thought. Hers is a return to searching for an ethic in signs— as artists and graphic designers used to do—like Josef MüllerBrockmann in the second post-war period, who aimed to obtain a new common field of debate beyond the surfeit of information.

Left: Re-enchantment, 2020 (detail) paper, scotch tape, flourescent paint, dimensions variable Right: Re-enchantment, 2020 (detail) iPad, flourescent paint, dimensions variable

67

Every single situation becomes a matter of death every minute in a continuous cycle. Going to the toilet and thinking blood will come out means you have cancer, and I will die in days or months. There is a constant fear. Most times, there is no reason behind this feeling. Or, it could be any triggering situation like hearing somebody died of cancer, so it will make me feel I will die as well. This feeling stays from a minute to months. It stops, slows down, and restart again.

68

Rudransh Nagi MFA in Photography

As symptoms of an anxiety disorder are not visible, it is difficult for people to understand its seriousness. This project shows that mental health is not the only thing affected, but that it snowballs into physical, emotional, sentimental, and social life. These underlying effects are not evident to a person who does not have an anxiety disorder and are devalued when people say that everybody goes through anxiety at some point.

Having the same reaction to your friend saying hello and being chased by a bear trying to kill you is what separates it from regular anxiety. This hypersensitive stage, most of the time, is turned on for many varied reasons. This series shows the deterioration of a person’s life using home degradation, mostly hidden from others.

Rudransh Nagi was born in New Delhi in 1990 and is currently based in Italy. After attaining political science and sociological degrees, he went to Paris, where he studied photography at Spéos. His goal is to use the photographic documentary language to witness and create a record of sociologically and anthropologically relevant situations. He is also interested in conceptual/diaristic uses of photography as a way to represent his own psychological life. His current works entail all the genres mentioned above. www.rudranshnagi.com

Pages 4-11, 13: Symptoms (series), 2020-21, digital photographs, 118.1x78.7 cm

69

It was common for me to keep thinking about the number of things that could have gone wrong. The event doesn’t have to be significant. It could be a mundane everyday life event. It doesn’t constantly come into mind. However, these thoughts come and go. And, there are times when different events just come and go.

70

There are times when it feels like that somebody is twisting it from inside. It stays for 2-3 days or could remain for a very long, creating even more significant problems like loss of appetite, nausea, bloated and many more.

71

It is so constant and loud in mind that it alters the way of thinking. Every single event somehow becomes a negative influence on the mind. There is no happiness and enjoyment of any positive aspects of life. Some examples of everyday thoughts - not worthy of winning a contest, not good enough to be in a relationship, I am a failure, never be good enough, and many more. These thoughts, even when something positive happens, used to become harmful.

72

One thought jumps from another. It creates problems while reading, writing, sleeping, working. It stays for as long as months to a year. Thoughts could vary from any topic or issue. They don’t have to be necessary. They could be as essential as ordering food or choosing a pen. During these phases, while reading a paragraph and thinking about what I have to do tomorrow, which results in two things, one, rereading the whole thing and, second, not registering anything to the point that when you read again, it feels like reading it for the first time.

73

No matter how close a person is, nobody feels close enough. Nobody to share things or have a conversation. Nobody to share the happiness or be there in need. In mind, everybody was busy in their own lives, or they had more important people. You always feel incomplete emotionally.

74

It varies from a specific muscle or the whole body. If anxiety is too high for a very long time, the entire body shakes heavily in the night before sleeping. There are thoughts as if there is an earthquake happening. I used to look at the furniture or ceiling fans to check if they are moving. Other times, any muscle or vein starts to twitch. There is no time limit to how long it could go.

75

Making the Intangible Tangible: How Metaphors Turned into Photographs Alessandra Capodacqua, Photographer and Curator

It is interesting to reflect on how the intangible is shaping everyone’s life these days. In these days of enforced seclusion, I am reminded of the most famous phrase from Antoine Sant’Exupery’s story The Little Prince: “it is our heart, much more than our eyes, that is the instrument we need to observe and understand reality, others and the world around us.”

Faced with personal and collective fragility, the theme of life and death touches and redefines everything. Faced with an invisible and impalpable enemy, which takes on the possible face of every person we meet, every relationship, we suddenly feel defenseless, exposed, and lost. It is a fragility that puts many interpersonal and social relationships out of action. A sine die suspension of one’s way of being. We develop syndromes. We perceive symptoms. We feel sick.

The photographic work Rudransh is carrying out has so much to do with the adaptation of the immaterial into the visible, translating his view to narrate life not as a whole, but as parted pieces of a life that is still.

Rudransh’s gaze evolved during recent months, and it was quite an experience to see how a literary interpretation, an automatic transmission of a concept, could

76

be transformed into a flourish of visual language, stripped of preconceptions and banalities, immersed in a conceptuality rich in nuances.

Substantial changes linked to light and color led to the creation of a universal language of physical and psychological symptoms with which Rudransh, but also each of us in this time, is confronted: panic, courage, anxiety, serenity, fear, daring, darkness, light, flatness, color—all symptoms that, in a mixture of alterations, imbue our motionless lives today.

His work reveals how ideas can develop in a time that imposes on us confinement, the impossibility of close contact, the prospect of looking far away beyond the view from our windows, and the alienating feeling of empty streets and unusual silence.

Those physical and psychological silences have fueled Rudransh’s artistic production, which presents us with delicate images full of unexpressed feelings— imaginative, earthly, supernatural, carnal, spiritual. In these images, we can all recognize our own sensations, our feelings, our fears.

Our lives.

Rudransh was able to transform into photographs that mixture of sensations that we all feel but often do not have the courage

to define and concretize. He has been courageous, farsighted, and perceptive in identifying a path and following it in a shrewd and sagacious manner.

Rudransh was able to convert a moment of difficulty into a fruitful act of artistic production by working on a change of perspective. His gaze was able to capture every nuance of light, every change of air, to tell of universal moments. I see in his work a beginning of a finely chiselled path that will lead him to

capture the essence of our time, and I look forward to seeing the evolution of his way of looking at the world, any world.

Rudransh’s final message seems to be: let us understand ourselves in order to transform ourselves, let us seize this opportunity to understand our fears and look at the world in a different way, to regain a sense of limitation and of our vulnerability as a value, and, with it, the ability to rely on our strengths.

77

78

David Neal MFA in Studio Art

David Neal’s work addresses inequality, surveillance, and control using video, photography, performance, and installation in order to critique institutional power. Institutions play an important role in society to assist communities by administering facilities and programs that promote learning. Artists and thinkers are taking actions to decolonize institutions and have shed light on the drawbacks. Neal is interested in how institutional powers give access and control to a person’s visibility and identity.

Who has access and who does not? Are the pathways to access equal? The U.S. education system still follows outdated standardized learning systems and teaching practices that are not equitable to students with learning disabilities or BIPOC students. In his work, Neal addresses these issues, raising questions as to how we might break from these outdated systems.

David Neal is an adopted Peruvian- American interdisciplinary artist currently residing in Florence, Italy. Neal’s work, rooted in his own experience, addresses inequality, surveillance, and control to critique institutional power. He received his BFA in Studio Arts from Beacon College in Leesburg, Florida, and is an MFA candidate at Studio Arts College International in Florence, Italy.

Left: Relic of an authority’s vulnerability (detail), 2021, buttons, clay, acrylic paint, installation, dimensions variable Above: Mr. Gobbledigook, 2020, digital photograph

79

80

Left: Centaur, 2020, digital photograph Above: Stepping out of class, 2020, performance on the streets of Florence, Italy

81

82

View of exhibition, Classroom, 2021, in SACI’s Maidoff Gallery

83

Top: My tooth, my tooth! tooth! (detail), 2021, vinyl lettering on wall, 414x109 cm Bottom: Blackboard,2021, chalk, blackboard paint on paper, 240x120 cm

84

Top: Classroom (series), 2021, buttons, thread on cotton fabric, 42x59.4 cm, dimensions variable Bottom: Just sit still, 2021, acrylic paint, vinyl lettering on canvas, 240x120 cm

85

David Neal’s Intimate Mythologies Emily Reilly, Director of Public Engagement & Associate Gallery Director, Bard Graduate Center David Neal’s selected works combine the ludic, nightmarish materiality of Mike Kelly with the performative intensity of Chris Burden and Adrian Piper.

These animistic, totemic works deploy mythological archetypes such as the Centaur or Cerberus as stand-ins for of-the-moment social anxieties, from the claustrophobia of lockdown to fear of contagion and the attendant paranoias around airflow, breath, and others’ breathing—as well as a redoubling of ever-relevant Foucauldian concerns, as interpersonal and self-surveillance increases to a fever pitch.

In Centaur, we find Neal playing the part of a mythic chimera with echoes of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. Kneeling on a fourlegged end table, mid-bellow, he brandishes a heavy pillow at a table lamp. His legs wrapped in fur, Neal’s homebound centaur speaks to the nearly complete integration with the domestic as, under lockdown, we become coextensive with home life and all of its accoutrements. More sinister still, like the Centaur of myth—representative of drunken violence—the virulent humanfurniture hybrid reflects an increase in reports of domestic abuse during quarantine.

Similarly antic and terrifying, Neal’s satirical pedagogical

86

persona, Mr. Gobbledigook, speaks to the confusion of global education systems as they try— and too often fail—to adapt to the pandemonium caused by Covid-19 and quarantines. As likely as his students to skip class, Neal’s durational performances as Mr. Gobbledigook are timed to the bell, lasting only as long as an average class period (though a school day-length performance Neal has expressed as an ambition).

As much a social or phenomenological experiment on the part of the artist as it is a work of art, Neal’s Gobbledigook takes up the tradition of Adrian Piper’s public Catalysis experiments, or her Mythic Being performances, as Neal confronts the public with discomfiting spectacle from behind a burnt khaki masque that recalls horror legends such as Texas Chainsaw Massacres Leather-Face or the Babadook.

Khaki, for Neal, represents conformity, the neutralizing of a child’s creativity, autonomy, and self-determination, especially present in dress code policies. In the documentary photographs that capture the performance Stepping out of class, Neal as Mr. Gobbledigook plays hooky, walking among shoppers in Florence’s upscale shopping districts. In another, he’s seen striding across polished marble floors in front of a man begging

for alms. In these moments, Neal’s clever title, Stepping out of class, doubles its meaning, as the artist obscures his identity and social status beneath the khaki masque, suggesting how conformity, inequality, and vulnerability in the realms of education extend into every part of society’s fabric.

Neal’s Student series features dozens of masks hung with red pins in the artist’s signature red, black, and khaki palette. Once again ruptured by scorch marks, these masks suggest a traumatic legacy as well as an origin story for Mr. Gobbledigook—whose mask, like these others, must have been fashioned in a classroom long ago. The burnt-out eye holes echo Argentine-Italian painter Lucio Fontana’s “specialist” cuts, while also suggesting a painful violence on the part of the students (not to mention Gobbledigook), who were forced to find their own way to see through the imperfect masks fashioned for them.

The Classroom series, featuring buttons sewn on white cloth, hung, and embroidered with a border of scarlet thread, while seeming materially more demure, retain the tension of Neal’s other compositions. Classroom 1a and 1b, for instance, features a lone white button facing off against a phalanx of 30 red buttons, while others in the series continue to

insist upon themes of alienation: the many against the one.

Finally, in Relic of an authority’s vulnerability, we find Neal once again engaging off-whites, reds, and blacks, in the form of a partial set of dentures, with its red gums and each of its three graying teeth punctured with four buttonholes, resting under a bell jar on a black platter. In this instance, however, Neal has been inspired by a bit of personal mythology, when in high school he and his classmates witnessed, in the midst of a tirade, their draconian instructor spit her dentures onto the floor. In that moment, her mask yanked off, she was exposed suddenly as all too human. Like so many in David Neal’s show, this piece speaks to the half-hidden humanity and macabre comedy of his work.

Student (series), 2021, cotton fabric, fire, water, acrylic paint, push pins 21x29.7 cm each

87

88

Victor Restrepo MFA in Photography

Un Viaggio When talking about my fears, almost two years ago, I said that the main fear was that my ideas would escape from my head on the operating table. The person I was talking to replied that others, perhaps, would come in.

Now, others looking at my images notice how precarious and unfinished the framed places and details look. Maybe because I still feel unfinished, “non finito.”

Born in Bogotá 26 years ago, Victor has always been in love with photography and obsessed with the desire to force a certain indexical rigidity into it, convinced that it can also be sculpture, performance, and more. Having disappeared on an operating table in 2019—reborn a second time shortly after—he now tells, physically in Colombia and dreamily in Italy, the story of his recovery and self-discovery.

This is not so much the journey, but a particular journey—one I started in the summer a year ago, in Florence, and that I am continuing now, in Bogotá. It is a journey of recovery and rediscovery, of what I thought I had lost and of my own vision.

All images pages 4-11, 13: Untitled (from the Non Finito series), 2020-21, digital inkjet prints on fiber archival paper, A2 42x59.4 cm

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

Victor Restrepo: Non Finito Jacopo Santini, Co-Director of SACI’s MFA in Photography Program

Today, Victor finished a journey that began at SACI three years ago in September 2018, interrupted almost two years ago due to a serious illness that forced him to return to Colombia—to an operation, the risk of losing his life, and a long, arduous recovery.

His simple presence among us, albeit through distance learning platforms, is a source of joy. The completion of his creative journey is a small miracle. Perhaps the miracle will be complete when he can finally return to the Florence he loves.

Two of his sentences are the cornerstones of the project he has been working on over the past year, in its sometimes erratic development. The first goes back to the eve of his flight back to Bogotá. Victor knew he had to undergo an operation with no certainty of the outcome and told me: “I’m afraid that when they open my skull my ideas will run away.” I told him: “more will come in.” And it is true that Victor’s gaze has changed. He said so himself, in response to a remark during a review about his penchant for photographing precarious, unstable, unfinished places (or details). “I photograph unfinished places because I still feel unfinished.”

I think this is the most appropriate title, because every journey

96

implies the consciousness of our finiteness and the possibility that the destination may change, suddenly, thanks to ideas brought to us by the same obstacles along the way.

His is a journey not only in Bogotá and Colombia, but also in himself. It is a self that is still partly unknown, a journey in which his own reactions, which are completely new, are a source of amazement. Victor does not know and is discovering, shot after shot, his new view of the world.

It is not far-fetched to assume that he is always observing two things: the portion of the world he is framing and the way he looks at it. Victor’s gaze is like that of a spectator surprised to see himself on stage and, in his case more than ever, it is undeniable that every photograph, whatever its subject, is a self-portrait. We never photograph the things, people, or spaces apparently framed by the viewfinder, but our reactions to those things, people, and spaces.

No one is more aware of this than he is.

In the absence of words, I resort to a beautiful story by Daniele Del Giudice, In the Museum of Reims.1 In one of the scenes, Anne tells Barnaba, the young Italian who was surprised, to the dismay of the museum keeper, to observe the paintings up close, almost to the

point of touching them: “there are people who stand on the edge of their eyes. They emerge from there.

It doesn’t depend on their inner qualities. Perhaps others, richer inside, have a gaze that doesn’t reach the pupil, but stops first, I don’t know, at the diaphragm, the chest, or somewhere in the head.

I don’t know how you see, but your gaze is so visible. It’s all there, at the edge of your eyes.”

Victor is on the edge of his eyes.

1

Daniele Del Giudice, “Nel Museo di Reims”, Einaudi, Torino, 1994

97

98

Marie-France Robichaud MFA in Photography

Memories in Erosions is an artistic research of our relationship with time—more specifically, on how memory loss can be represented in different ways by using the geographic concept of erosion.

The ideas developed are rooted in stories or experiences from the past but are used to explain the present.

Using the snowball effect, the starting point for the projects is Gabrielle, the author’s paternal grandmother. It was the curiosity for the degradation of her memory, evaporating and disappearing, that influenced the final images, which derive from landscapes, archives of the paternal and maternal family, self-portraits, written stories, and personal journals.

Born in Canada, Marie-France Robichaud lives in New Brunswick, where she received a BA in Visual Arts from the Université de Moncton. After receiving the S.H. Mackay Merit Scholarship, she took courses in photography, which then became her primary artistic interest. The main theme of her artistic research is our relationship to time, expressed in narrative visual form. She then undertook a master’s degree in photography at Studio Arts College International in Florence (Italy), for which she received an internal scholarship and the ARTSNB Scholarship for Arts Studies as well as the Baxter & Alma Ricard Graduate Scholarship.

This report covers the attempts and process and is treated like scientific research. Each chapter explains how the information was collected and stored and accounts for the reflections and information gathered behind the artistic attempts. Each has different outcomes and hypotheses during the process. Questions are answered with more questioning.

It is a constant DNA trail that keeps evolving.

Left: Persienne (I), 2019, inkjet print on fiber-based Canson Baryta 310 paper of scans from negatives and digital files, 51.2x83.8 cm Above: Gabrielle, 2020, inkjet print on fiber-based paper of scans from negatives and digital files, 72x72 cm

99

100

Left (top): Claudette, 2020, inkjet print on fiber-based paper of scans from negatives and digital files, 72x72 cm Left (bottom): Romeo, 2020, inkjet print on fiber-based paper of scans from negatives and digital files, 72x72 cm Above: Persienne (II), 2019, inkjet print on fiber-based Canson Baryta 310 paper of scans from negatives and digital files, 51.4x83.8 cm

101

102

Top: Timeline, 2020, inkjet print on fiber-based paper of scans from negatives and digital files, 100x746.4 cm Bottom: Particule 1-3, 2020, inkjet prints on fiber-based paper of scans from negatives and digital files, 200x200 cm each

103

104

Left and above: Ambivalence (I/II), 2020, inkjet prints on fiber-based paper of scans from negatives and digital files, 235x220 cm

105

Marie-France Robichaud: A Very Gentle Shredder Dejan Atanackovic, Visual Artist and Writer

What do we see? The gaze, by convention, moves from left to right as we look at a long horizontal composition: photographs from a family album of another time that seem to be invaded by fragments of a landscape. Reduced to strips, as if by some mechanical cutting device, the landscape, in which we distinguish treetops and the portions of sky, is turned into a dynamic series of horizontal lines, which create a labyrinth for the observer’s eyes. Soon the habit of conventional reading is abandoned in favor of free wandering.

From what we can see, the landscape offers no indication of any specific place or time, and it seems to be advancing, sneaking in, growing sideways, both left and right, over the nameless faces.

Therefore, the patches of sky that should be vertical appear as horizontal white lines, as acts of cancellation that, needless to say, contribute to the overall sense that the entire process of cutting and re-gathering these photographic pieces must have something to do with a peculiar sort of indecision.

Are things being canceled, removed, passed through a shredder, and juxtaposed in order to be hidden?

Or are they instead carefully gathered, saved, and preserved, with the attention of an investigator looking for a hidden clue?

106

And the more we ask such questions, the more our gaze shifts from the content of the fragmented pictures to their outlines, to those individual edges created by the cuts. Because, clearly, we assume, it is in those points of contact that we should look for something specific. The separation created by a knife, or by a shredder, inevitably leaves a minimal space between, and so the gaze after a series of attempts to detect some grammatical principle—an enigmatic visual syntax—finally focuses on what certainly remains unseen, as if the purpose of all that is visible in the composition is only to conceal something that occurs right there in the infinitesimal depth of those cuts.

Those of us who know MarieFrance understand how important the very act of gathering family portraits is to her, as well as creating intuitive points of contact between them, revealing hidden ties, and finding visual clues that offer new readings of her family history. For the past two years, Marie-France tried to deal with the progressive loss of memory of her grandmother (Gabrielle, the heroine of all her work), which deeply affected her sense of identity and time, by focusing, obviously not by accident, on her father’s profession: geography.

Art, for Marie-France, is a complex topography of inner emotional

flows, a map of places and events in which the final outcome is not any less important than all tiny and invisible relations that bring it to its materialization (including, most certainly, a complex network of family ties), and so, clearly, the dynamic processes of the ever-changing Earth immediately became inseparable from the ambiguous connection between memory and oblivion. Oblivion floods the firm land of memory.

The land slowly crumbles and dissolves, creating deeper and deeper layers of deposited pasts, and the very point of contact, that line formed by the cut, is the ever-changing form of human knowledge.

In the photographic collage series Timeline and Persienne, this becomes particularly evident. The act of shredding a picture, either physically or by software, opens in the viewer’s mind the question of what came first, the evidence of loss or the loss of evidence, and thus the conclusion that in order to (attempt to) understand the past we must dismantle the past. Yet, as it occurs with any intentionally or unintentionally broken object, at the moment of reassembling we realize that even the most minimal displacements inevitably make it impossible for the last, tiny bit of debris to perfectly fit.

The complete reconstruction is therefore a utopia, an inevitable defeat, against which we can only

develop more or less successful, intriguing, and beautiful strategies of concealment.

Certainly, inevitable defeats are best handled with a touch of humor, as in the case of Portraits, in which all facial features of selected family members remain concealed by the playful composition of a fragmented landscape. Perfectly square, somewhere between a formal art portrait and a mugshot, the Portraits again provoke, in a more radical way, the indecision in a viewer to decide whether those “faces” are there to hide or to reveal, to obliterate or to expose the real nature of the portrayed.

But let me add in the end: aren’t we all inhabitants of a strange era in which things, rapidly and more than ever before, tend to vanish? Not to hide, nor to transform—simply vanish. In the artwork of Marie-France, I see exactly that sort of unexpectedly mature understanding: while we are mirrors to the processes of obliteration, we see an extraordinary beauty in the merciless fact of our own inevitable disappearance. We play with the debris of our lives that we observe and gently collect as it piles up with our every step. We dare the savage certainties of our unchangeable future by exposing the beauty of our unpredictable past. And by doing so, aren’t we, now and again, having a great time?

107

Studio Arts College International Master of Fine Arts Programs

SACI’s community of MFA students works in a creative environment of rigorous critical and technical inquiry, utilizing the unique artistic and cultural resources of Florence, Italy, to prepare students for careers as artists and college instructors. For a duration of two years, students live and work in the city that, during the Renaissance, revolutionized art and has since served as an inspiration and catalyst for generations of artists.

By fully exploiting the advantages available to emerging artists through advanced study in Florence, SACI MFA students can become highly competitive when seeking a professional artistic career and universitylevel teaching positions. Throughout their lives, they will be able to realize work reflecting their unique experience and deep understanding of Italian art and the nature of the artist’s role in society. www.saci-florence.edu

108

Index

Foreword

2

Introductions

3

Lindsey Campbell: In LIght of IBS 9 Being Here: Lindsey Campbell’s Mental Photographs

by Dejan Atanackovic 16 Joe Cimino: Day to Day 19 Joe Cimino by Valeria Mancinelli 26

Eric J. Frey: The Archive of Memories 29

Eric J. Frey: The Ministry of Mnemosyne’s Archive of Memories by

Valeria D’Ambrosio 36 Bridget Hannah: Blog Mapping 39 Next Level: Reflections on Blob Maps by Martin Foessleitner 46 Arais Meteyard: This is This 49 Perception Requires Attention by Daria Filardo 56 Melissa Morris: And the grid’s heart fluttered 59 Melissa Morris: “And the grid’s heart fluttered” by Lorenzo Bruni 65 Rudransh Nagi: Symptoms 69 Making the Intangible Tangible: How Metaphors Turned into Photographs

by Alessandra Capodacqua 76 David Neal: Classroom 79 David Neal’s Intimate Mythologies by Emily Reilly 86 Victor Restrepo: Non Finito 89 Victor Restrepo: Non Finito by Jacopo Santini 96 Marie-France Robichaud: Memories in Erosions 99 Marie-France Robichaud: A Very Gentle Shredder by Dejan Atanackovic 106 Studio Arts College International 108

109

EXHIBITION

This catalog (a box set of 10 individual booklets) is published in conjunction with the exhibition Apprehensions of the Material World, held in the exhibition spaces of SACI’s Jules Maidoff Palazzo for the Visual Arts, in via Sant’Egidio 14, Florence, Italy, from April 15-25, 2021. This catalog features the final projects and critical texts of graduating students in the MFA in Studio Art, MFA in Photography, and MFA in Communication Design programs at Studio Arts College International (SACI) in Florence, Italy.

TEXTS BY

Dejan Atanackovic, Steven Brittan, Lorenzo Bruni, Alessandra Capodacqua, Valeria D’Ambrosio, Romeo Di Loreto, Daria Filardo, Martin Foessleitner, Valeria Mancinelli, Emily Reilly, Jacopo Santini, Kirsten Stromberg, Camilla Torna

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Daria Filardo, Pietro Gaglianò, Regan Wheat

GRAPHIC DESIGN / COVER DESIGNS Naomi Muirhead / Bridget Hannah

PHOTO CREDITS

Jacopo Santini, Mary Rezny (for Arais Meteyard), and the artists

COPY EDITING

Christina Gednalske

PRINTED BY

Litografia I.P. - Florence, Italy

ISBN (complete box set of 10 individual booklets) 9788885495081

Studio Arts College International Palazzo dei Cartelloni Via Sant’Antonino, 11 50123 Florence, Italy info@saci-florence.edu www.saci-florence.edu Copyright © 2021 Studio Arts College International, SACI Press. All rights reserved.

PRESS 110

ISBN 9788885495081