Inventory of Fragments
Posted on April 01 2019
Author Mauro Zanchi
Translated by Jennifer Cooper
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For Alberto Sinigaglia (1984) the construction of a project is like an investigation, which continues to evolve to build a visual language, both personal and universal, to give shape to specific thoughts and reflections, and to shed light on some mechanisms still not revealed. Photography is his privileged means of communication, the way to face and analyze reality. The projects, although they concern different themes, are linked by recurrent concepts and extended exploration processes: they invite the viewer into a space of speculation, where clues, traces, intuitions are disseminated, which support hypotheses and further narrations and readings. Sinigaglia is to be considered an inventor of fragments, which are used to question our visual knowledge of the world.
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Big Sky Hunting (2013) is a wide-ranging journey, where the intangible, fiction, contradictions and reinterpretation of what has been seen are brought into play to explore territories that go beyond descriptive representations and to analyze our perception of the cosmos and induced connections. Through the collection of old photographic and textual documents, used by scientists to create images of the universe, and damaged or unusable photographic material, Sinigaglia confirms and overcomes the limitations of a description linked to reality, reveals the artificial nature of such images, and at the same time it reflects on the role of the photographic medium and on the limits of our ability to see through its mediation.
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Alberto Sinigaglia, Big Sky Hunting, 2013
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The Big Sky Hunting series was inspired by a finding in a site, that is a box full of original astronomical glass plates, documents, fragments of prints, materials from the seventies and eighties, and other objects purchased by the artist on the web , the most important of which is a book by John Ellard Gore, entitled The Landscape of the Sky (1892), a report of astronomical wonders.
Do the images of the outer space totally fall within the surface and perimeter of the traditional photos or is there something else that goes beyond the approximations of the appearance of what we seem to see?
What relationship do images have with the visual processing of electromagnetic waves captured by advanced scientific machinery or figured in people's consciousness? How we represent the universe is only an approximation of what is actually the complexity of the universe?
To try to approach the questions without still not having answers, Sinigaglia uses the sequence called "Paper I-II-III" (documents that show handwritten numbers aligned in a square form), considering it as an image that alludes to a moment before manipulation , at a time when most of the digital images we are used seeing are based on the processing of numbers.
Do the images of the outer space totally fall within the surface and perimeter of the traditional photos or is there something else that goes beyond the approximations of the appearance of what we seem to see?
What relationship do images have with the visual processing of electromagnetic waves captured by advanced scientific machinery or figured in people's consciousness? How we represent the universe is only an approximation of what is actually the complexity of the universe?
To try to approach the questions without still not having answers, Sinigaglia uses the sequence called "Paper I-II-III" (documents that show handwritten numbers aligned in a square form), considering it as an image that alludes to a moment before manipulation , at a time when most of the digital images we are used seeing are based on the processing of numbers.
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Alberto Sinigaglia, Big Sky Hunting, 2013
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Regarding the exploration of Italian metaphotography we also asked Sinigaglia some questions to go further into the still open topics of previous interviews:
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M. Z.: Joan Fontcuberta, in her latest book The Fury of Images, talks about post-photography in the era of the "second digital revolution", or photography in relation to the complex machine that acts, produces, chews and shreds images continuously, besides through reality and media also passing through social networks, internet, telephony, the virtual and more. He says that photographic images "no longer work the way we are used to", and that we therefore need to reconsider them. How do you reconsider them?
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A. S.: I believe that my work is an attempt to reconsider the way images work.
In Big Sky Hunting, I examined the way in which photography functions as a tool for exploring astronomical space and how the imaginary produced discounts the obsolescence and the congenital process of erosion in the technology itself, which produces images. Still within the ambit of sublime technology, in Microwave City I took a powerful and recognizable icon like the atomic explosion and through digital manipulation* I camouflaged it in an attempt to reflect on the mystifying and surreal power of the photographic medium.
In Big Sky Hunting, I examined the way in which photography functions as a tool for exploring astronomical space and how the imaginary produced discounts the obsolescence and the congenital process of erosion in the technology itself, which produces images. Still within the ambit of sublime technology, in Microwave City I took a powerful and recognizable icon like the atomic explosion and through digital manipulation* I camouflaged it in an attempt to reflect on the mystifying and surreal power of the photographic medium.
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M. Z.: Would you tell us about your project related to the testing of atomic bombs that took place in the desert a few miles from the Las Vegas hotel terraces? Working on the iconographic material regarding the invention and development of the atomic bomb contained in the images archive of the Los Alamos scientific laboratories, what was your conceptual operation and your translation into opera of these photographs from the archive?
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A. S.: Microwave City was born from a trip to the American West, between New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada, and the title refers to a radio broadcast I heard while I was looking for uranium lakes and expanses of concrete that cover uranium processing areas , now out of use. It was a catholic radio station and the preacher was defining Las Vegas as a Microwaved City, an ephemeral city where everything is quickly wanted - got - consummated, a place that by its very nature is based on staging and exasperation, a place where it is not possible to make a clear distinction between real and artifice. Las Vegas also has a deep connection with the Manhattan Project, both in terms of geographical proximity to the test areas but also as a place: a symbolic city of America, born in the immediate post-war period, after the world war ended with the images of atomic explosions in the eyes, also an artifice, like the bomb, born in the sands of the desert. The project is divided into two main chapters: that of clouds, which we will discuss later and that of still life.
The latter describes a series of objects, photographed in a very detailed and clean way, that work like souvenirs sold in an online store; some, instruments of vision-measurers-ephemera, are triggered in relation to other images, others are memorabilia, which conceal stories / legends behind their cold aesthetics: for example, deer horns come from the Seneca Depot, an area controlled by the army, where radioactive waste has been buried since the 1950s and is today the largest reserve of albino deer in the world. Or the graphite monolith, which seems to come from the deposit of material that Enrico Fermi used to build the Chicago Pile (1942), the first nuclear fission reactor. A third passage in Microwave City always works on the Los Alamos Labs archive and on one I built during my visit to Las Vegas. On one hand there are images of bunkers and architecture that were built to observe the bomb, on the other textual messages that come from pornographic materials that are found in every corner of the city. In terms of installation, both of these elements are placed in lightboxes, whose light in my intent should give a second life and a second reading to the archive images, and at the same time recall the neon lights of Las Vegas.
The latter describes a series of objects, photographed in a very detailed and clean way, that work like souvenirs sold in an online store; some, instruments of vision-measurers-ephemera, are triggered in relation to other images, others are memorabilia, which conceal stories / legends behind their cold aesthetics: for example, deer horns come from the Seneca Depot, an area controlled by the army, where radioactive waste has been buried since the 1950s and is today the largest reserve of albino deer in the world. Or the graphite monolith, which seems to come from the deposit of material that Enrico Fermi used to build the Chicago Pile (1942), the first nuclear fission reactor. A third passage in Microwave City always works on the Los Alamos Labs archive and on one I built during my visit to Las Vegas. On one hand there are images of bunkers and architecture that were built to observe the bomb, on the other textual messages that come from pornographic materials that are found in every corner of the city. In terms of installation, both of these elements are placed in lightboxes, whose light in my intent should give a second life and a second reading to the archive images, and at the same time recall the neon lights of Las Vegas.
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Alberto Sinigaglia, Microwave City, 2017
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M. Z.: Your investigation of the transformation of dramatic events into souvenirs is interesting. What is really hidden in the soft and mysterious clouds suspended in the sky of nuclear experiments?
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A. S.: During the 1950s and 1960s one of the attractions of Las Vegas was the possibility of observing bomb tests from the hotel terraces, which took place a hundred miles away, in the area we know as Area 51. The tourists used to photograph these dramatic scenes turning them into postcards, into their holiday souvenirs, as if it was an enchanting sunset, a magnet to attach to the fridge. During the study of the archive I was struck by the controversial beauty of the explosions and by acting on them in the same way as the tourists, I appropriated them and manipulated them to produce harmless, soft and mysterious clouds suspended in the sky. The bomb is there, but disguised. The user can perceive its presence, but it is camouflaged, hidden by the mystifying power of photography.
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M. Z.: We are interested in investigating your gaze further, which considers photography as a repository of social and cultural values in a world saturated by images. What do you intend to move and shift with your photographic images?
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A. S.: I try to shift the attention of the beholder. I think of my work as an inventory of fragments, which questions our perception and visual awareness of the world. Relying on our desire for truth and poetry, I try to invite the user into a space of speculation, in which the image is questioned.
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Alberto Sinigaglia, Microwave City, 2017
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M. Z.: Can you talk about your investigation on the relationship between reality and fiction, between research of sources and creative displacement, between document and creation?
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A. S.: We all live in a system of memories and traces that help us read the present. These memories and traces over time are altered, modified, overwritten, making our reading-vision less clear, the boundary between real and fiction less clear. Both of my works (Big Sky Hunting, Microwave City) go to investigate the iconography relating to memories of very specific events in history, working precisely on the areas of shadow, on the possible re-readings in a present key.
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M. Z.: What do you think of the trend that has recently come out around the use of the archive?
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A. S.: The archive responds to a need to orientate in an excess of knowledge that leaves us disoriented.
We are all compulsive accumulators, who continue to store data on memory cards, unable to select, to take the time to understand what is worth remembering and what to forget. We all produce archives, inventories, catalogs, lists in an attempt to bring order to these fragments. The archive is *as a device to produce a collective memory that is not crystallized but open to overwriting, interpretations and second readings, and it is here that we artists intervene: “The archives still retain a great charm and their authenticity because they have the extraordinary power to speak to people temporally, geographically and even culturally distant from those who created and organized them, while still bringing their original intentions and visions and codes "(Cristina Baldacci, Impossible Archives, Johan & Levi Editore, 2016).
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We are all compulsive accumulators, who continue to store data on memory cards, unable to select, to take the time to understand what is worth remembering and what to forget. We all produce archives, inventories, catalogs, lists in an attempt to bring order to these fragments. The archive is *as a device to produce a collective memory that is not crystallized but open to overwriting, interpretations and second readings, and it is here that we artists intervene: “The archives still retain a great charm and their authenticity because they have the extraordinary power to speak to people temporally, geographically and even culturally distant from those who created and organized them, while still bringing their original intentions and visions and codes "(Cristina Baldacci, Impossible Archives, Johan & Levi Editore, 2016).
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Alberto Sinigaglia, Microwave City, Vegas, 2017
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M. Z.: Does your metaphotography belong to a modality aimed at a process of further awareness, to analyze more deeply what we see, how we see it, how images influence emotions and how they contribute to the understanding of things that happen or will happen?
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A. S.: My approach has partly abandoned the "program" of photography to represent reality, focusing on how information and the apparatus (archive / digital manipulation) contribute to generating images today, investigating the nature of the images themselves: "The experimental photographers are aware of the fact that the image, the apparatus, the program and the information constitute their basic problems. They are aware that they are trying to recover those situations from the apparatus, and insert into the image something that was not inscribed in the apparatus program "(Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 1984).
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M. Z.: The relationships of photography with truth and with the memory we took for granted no longer hold up, nor does it hold up the aura of realism that we continue to attribute to photography. In addition, the matters of manipulation and virtuality have been added. Furthermore, it is necessary to analyze the functions, uses, social roles, cultural and political contexts. What are the new areas of creation that you feel close to your research?
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A. S.: What interests me the most is to continue to investigate the relationship between science and image, between technology and photography. The American century has culturally influenced our generation more than we like to think, and America as a nation has built its identity on technological progress, on the technological sublime. The Apollo missions and space explorations, rather than the atomic bomb, are a fundamental part of this cultural legacy, just like the wars of the '900 and the more recent ones. The Internet is a military invention as much as the microwave, the night view, the drones; all subjects that have become part of our lives and have changed our perception of reality, and consequently our way of representing it. This is what interests and fascinates me the most, and the area that I will continue to investigate.
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M. Z.: Through your reflections and your works, what do you bring out about the relationship between image and collective imagination?
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A. S.: I hope the distortions.
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Alberto Sinigaglia, Microwave City, Vegas, 2017
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M. Z.: In recent years, many artists have questioned the medium of traditional photography (with scanners, scans, image distortions, surveillance cameras, irruptions of other mediums, leaving room for the presence of the case) to go further. What does it mean for you to go beyond the photographic medium?
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A. S.: I believe we have reached a point of bulimia and visual satiation. Most of us continually record reality through our devices. I therefore believe that the position of domination and possession of the author has disappeared, because the awareness that it entails has disappeared.
Hence the need to question the medium himself, to question it to understand its limits and potential. All this responds to a need, my personal first and foremost, to bring order to the chaos / oblivion generated by the internet and technological development, to a greater attention to the gaze, to concentration on what we really look at. Each tool is valid for the purpose.
In my first works I tried to ask myself questions on the argument, combining traditional photographic images, use of the archive, re-photographed projections, digital manipulation. For the next projects I would like to work on a more installative and three-dimensional form.
Hence the need to question the medium himself, to question it to understand its limits and potential. All this responds to a need, my personal first and foremost, to bring order to the chaos / oblivion generated by the internet and technological development, to a greater attention to the gaze, to concentration on what we really look at. Each tool is valid for the purpose.
In my first works I tried to ask myself questions on the argument, combining traditional photographic images, use of the archive, re-photographed projections, digital manipulation. For the next projects I would like to work on a more installative and three-dimensional form.
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M. Z.: Do you often introduce short circuits in your work?
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A. S.: If by "short circuit" we mean the moment in which randomness, programming, spontaneity and accumulation combine to form a visual discourse, it is a fundamental moment of my research. It works almost like a synchronicity switch, a switcher, which opens a phase in which all these autonomous elements fit into the project structure.
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Alberto Sinigaglia, Microwave City, Stills Life, 2016 - 2017
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M. Z.: How do you organize the space in your eyes before creating a photographic image?
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A. S.: The space of my gaze is completely disorganized. It consists of physical places, readings, mental places, apparitions, clues, traces that emerge along a constant stream of research and which then finds different formalizations.
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M. Z.: To go beyond what photography has put into action so far, do you think it is necessary to sacrifice traditional photography or to go against most of its mechanisms and principles?
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A. S.: A premise: I don't feel like an author working against photography or pushing its limits towards unknown horizons. Until now I have always tried to find a balance between working against and with photography, looking for that interaction, the short circuit we talked about before, which activates and makes them work together. I think of my work as an inventory of fragments that questions our visual knowledge of the world; relying on our desire for truth and poetry, I try to invite the viewer into a space of speculation.
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