20 NR: The idea of themes comes up often, that the program should investigate things in a kind of museum-like, curatorial fashion. I feel that idea doesn’t work all that well. The performing arts are messy, which I think is a wonderful message. Our audience members will each find different threads through a series of performances than I would. I may have a strong idea of what I think the threads are, but I don’t want those to be imposed on anyone else. There needs to be a space for curiosity, and so, for me, the program has to be right intuitively. JV: That really appeals to me. The art experiences that are the most important for me are those that I am perplexed by, agitated by, or bothered by—sometimes in combination with beauty. In my case, when selecting works for an exhibition, I want that exhibition itself to be a work of art. Once someone walks into an exhibition, there’s the experience of walking in, and then there are more experiences that build upon each turn throughout the space. Each visitor has their own trajectory, and an individual experience. And yet I want to set the work up so that there are certain things that happen within the whole—so that every trajectory, every combination, will be valid. It’s tricky. I redo and redo the configuration to get something that feels like a whole. On the other hand, if the exhibition is in a gallery, I want people literally to walk away with one of the images, so it’s necessary for the pieces to work independently as well. NR: We’ve been talking about intuition. How has that guided your work? JV: I’m intuitive when I’m shooting. Right now, I’m in the middle of another tree project I started in Spoleto. I’d done a series of olive tree photographs many years back. I never thought I would do another until there were several large earthquakes in 2016. After it happened, buildings, or parts of buildings, would just come down. At that time, I found myself outside a lot because people were very afraid. Everything that we knew felt like it was up for grabs. It was scary. But when I was out there with the olive trees, I found myself calming down and feeling such an appreciation for the ongoing nature of nature. After some time, I had an idea—an
experiment, really: in photographing these trees, can I express something about the people and culture who tend olive trees—even though people aren’t necessarily in the pictures? I’ve since traveled to orchards in Israel, Arizona, and California, where I am now. Still, I don’t have an agenda. If the olive trees all seem as though they could be anywhere to a viewer, that’s fine. That’s not failure. And if there are ways in which people look at these images and feel something slightly different, that will be interesting to me, too.
