LoosenArt Mag / Gallery

Interview with Caterina Morigi

Posted on October 25 2019

Author Sara Benaglia / Mauro Zanchi
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Interview conducted on the occasion of the exhibition Metafotografia
5th October - 3rd November 2019 Baco ass., Bergamo, Italy
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M. Zanchi, S. Benaglia: Looking at the surface of your work, you seem to see a desire for de-petrification [Xenofeminism] and an operation to change "Nature". What is your relationship with copying?
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C. Morigi: Surface is the right word as with my work I often look at the surfaces of things, not to remain in a superfluous layer of the substance, but to show that what transpires to an external vision tells us much more than what we initially imagine: you just need to look carefully at transparency, real or metaphorical.
My speech is not intentionally about Xenopheminism. If this happens it is perhaps by osmosis with the wider natural-cultural context in which we are inevitably placed. However, I am intrigued by this interpretation.
My reasoning on copying starts from the history of art, from how nature has always been imitated and attempts have been made to reconstruct reality, in painting and sculpture; on the other hand, I wonder if it is possible to survive, in close contact, of copy and original, what this closeness entails, and if, in comparison, an element is condemned to succumb or perish.
Reality Remade is the title of the first chapter of Nelson Goodman's book Languages of Art. He questions the nature of representation, pointing out that it is necessary to choose a selection of the aspect to be copied, i.e. it is not possible to obtain a total and identical representation of the original, but only to reconstruct one of the ways in which the object is or appears. The representation will therefore be only partial, a reason for this concerns the subjectivity of the point of view: the inexistence of the innocent eye, of which Gombrich1 spoke, since the gaze will always be influenced by its previous experience and charged with interpretation.
The other aspect concerns the distance between the copy and the original, as happened with the portraits of the emperors, sent to the margins of the kingdom so that they could be admired. Copies are normally not placed close to the originals, on the contrary they fear and are affected by the comparison; it happens that reproductions live, and survive, far from the original, as it happens for example also to copies of the cities. Salvatore Settis2 talks about the multitude of copies of the city of Venice, and the many neighborhoods of the same name, scattered throughout the world. There is also a copy, in the form of an amusement park, built a few kilometers from Venice. Veneland, a theme park built in the second half of the 1970s, fifteen kilometers from Venice (Morocco of Mogliano, Treviso), went bankrupt quickly. With its Rialto Bridge-shaped entrance, it housed typical attractions of the Luna park, but by the early eighties it had already been closed. This case seems to tell us that the copies, rather than the comparison, do not stand the closeness to the originals. The copies that are placed, in some way, will always refer to the originals. The one who only observes the copy will receive an image of the original, but each individual will have a different idea, giving rise to a multitude of different imagined versions.
In Portrait (Cursi, 2016) I deal with the theme of the copy: I selected a scrap rock from the raw surface and I ordered a stone copy made. The copy is specular, not exact. I placed the elements in a former quarry, one in front of the other, as if the two stones could look at each other. The intention is to pay homage to the stone itself of one's own portrait, in contrast to the instrumental use that has been made of it for millennia. The realization took place through a long process of scanning the original and reproduction with a numerical control machine, whose signs remain visible from close up. When for a sculpture one relies on the hand and on the eyes of a craftsman one cannot avoid the influence of his/her gaze and personal interpretation; but even using the most technologically advanced numerical control machine, the problem cannot be overcome: it will not be possible to reach a total degree of mimesis, for various reasons there will always be a gap, an error. Moreover, if with marble it is not possible to reproduce, for example, the softness of the flesh, one could still think that with stone it is easier to imitate another stone, but one must consider that it is not possible to reconstruct the signs of time that have remained impressed, the nuances, the fossils of that precise fragment.
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Caterina Morigi, Portrait, 2016
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M. Z., S. B.: Could you tell us about the project 1/1?
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C.M.: As man imitates nature, nature poetically resembles man. Think of the marbling in Pompeian houses, churches and palaces. Stone textures have always been reproduced, in some cases even when the material could be used in its original form. At the same time I would like to draw attention to how the veins of marble are similar to the human epidermis. 1/1 focuses on the relationship that exists between man and nature, in a mutual relationship of imitation and similarity.
Three very thin and wide porcelain slabs have been made: it is an industrial product, an architectural coating on the surface of which a natural stone texture is printed using different techniques. The tiles, which are also included in the manufacturer's catalogue, faithfully reproduce an existing marble slab, in full scale, previously scanned. To this first print (and firing) I added a second level of images depicting various elements: leather with moles, stains, pores, veins, but also ancient marbles, especially those used by Roman craftsmen in the Opus Sectile of the fourth century AC for the complexion, and other stones on which you can see the signs of time.

Given the high definition of the print, 1/1 is perceived in space initially as a natural material, authentic Tuscan marble, until approaching it you can also observe the side. It will be discovered that the veins do not continue on the sides and that the thickness is too narrow to allow such a large marble surface to remain intact.
Illusoriness is a factor that often seems to be connected to representation: the more the copy is mistaken for the original, the more successful the representation will be. If you think of a pictorial portrait, it is easy to come to the conclusion that it lacks depth and therefore lacks the information that makes it identical to the original; but in the case of a sculpture it is easier to delude oneself that a degree of similarity is more attainable.
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M. Z., S. B.: What is time in track writing?
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C.M.: Material, whether pure, raw, synthetic or organic, is always subject to change and closely linked to time, because it bears traces of it. The change in some contexts is difficult to perceive, because of its slow progression. With time we accumulate traces, with traces we can read time. On stone, due to its hardness, time is almost imperceptibly imprinted and even man leaves his marks on it, cutting it, bumping it, or even caressing it.
I can think of Guidarello's stone lips, marked by the kisses of women in search of a husband. The tombstone, attributed to Tullio Lombardo and kept in the Pinacoteca della Loggetta Lombardesca in Ravenna, carries a great magnetic charge, due to the history and legends of the leader Guidarello Guidarelli (Ravenna, 1450-1460 - Imola, 1501), the daring knight who suffered an early violent death, with whom he assumed a mythical aura of courage and beauty; but the stone object contributed greatly to his fame. In the statue the legendary beauty of the character is transposed into sculptural beauty. The legend has it that girls without a husband, if they had kissed Guidarello's marble lips, would have married within the year. So, waves of people reached his tomb to try the romantic gesture that would fulfill the desire. But Guidarello's mouth was definitively marked by these kisses, polished by the touches, stained by the lipsticks, consumed by the magical expectations with which it was loaded.
This stone, an attractive body, is consumed, revealing years of pilgrimages, but at the same time in the stone is also visible an intrinsic story, that of the accumulated substance that makes up the same rock. Sea beds, fossils, lava and much more trace the passage of the years. Then time can be read not only on things, but also in things.
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Caterina Morigi, 1/1 ( detail ), 2018
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M. Z., S. B.: Can Guidarello's lips, full of kisses, expectations and imaginary projections, be considered, in your opinion, an objective correlative of art? Even in the negative sense, in the sense of a consumption due to time and to the change of course in an evolutionary path, or on the contrary in the positive sense, of an aura construction, or of a work loaded with countless lives and passing (of the users of art).
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C.M.: Time helps to create incessant stratifications, in the formation of an increasingly complex plot. The same certainly happens with art. In the works that change (installation, painting, sculpture) I don't think we have to go on with excessive restorations, if not to keep them intact in their structure. Time accumulates and it must be left evident, trying not to give in to the easy temptation of seeing an object blocked at its birth; this can be done with technology, with photography, which has a lot to do with time, without resorting to freezing. 
In my works I never escape the writing of time, objects are modified resulting in a synecdoche of reality. All’eternar le opere (Venice, 2015) is composed of fragments of stone from the city of Venice, which I wet with special inks, whose fluidity allows you to penetrate the material, releasing salt crystals accumulated in the stone due to the microclimate lagoon. I acted on the stone material, highlighting its accelerated process of erosion, bringing out its structure and cracks, otherwise invisible.
Taking a fragment to refer to the landscape is equivalent to considering the part to speak of the whole, the pars pro toto - which also applies in the opposite direction, or rather the whole for the part - creates a synecdoche according to which the stone stands for the landscape. So does art.
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M. Z., S. B.: Can you tell us about the idea of copying (which starts from the history of art), especially with regard to the medium of photography in your research and its relationship with reality (through the imitation of nature) or with the invisible of reality?
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C.M.: I can't distinguish between disciplines and circumscribe my references on a temporal level So for this answer too I would like to make a similar reading: for assonances, starting from the assumption that photography, painting, applied arts, sculpture, moving image, and so on, always speak of look, and of matter, so certainly of representation.
I turn to nature as a subject, because traditionally, since photography did not exist, it was not placed at the center of the representation, but it was at the edge of the work. I am interested in this reversal, between the natural background and the subject, which has been carried out several times in the past, but not always under everyone's eyes, because it is skilfully hidden. Only from a certain moment in the history of art does nature become the autonomous protagonist of space, making incursions as a subject into still life and landscape painting genres; other cases of representations have previously occurred, for example the mosaic representations of the unswept floors of Hellenistic origin, which show the remains of a finished banquet. Beato Angelico is an example in this sense: he personally made four marbled panels in the convent of San Marco in Florence, in the lower band of the fresco Sacra conversazione, dedicated to the Madonna. Because of their anomalous materiality and density, these marbles do not go unnoticed. George Didi-Huberman1 believes that the portions of the wall painted imitating the texture of marble in the cycle of frescoes have the same value as the figures that are just above. They are neither background nor decoration, but the Angelic adds a meaning to them, raising them on the same level as the saints and the Madonna and Child; at the same time, they are loaded with greater complexity, giving through technique a deeper sense to the background-decoration, and therefore to the very nature they represent.
I am also very attached to Michelangelo Antonioni's cinema, because he reserved for places and things a much greater space than in the past. In 1964 in Red Desert the director seems to place the landscape as the subject of the entire film, entrusting it to the eyes of the protagonist. The director dwells so much on the landscape, often understood as an artificial place, that it seems to be the only aspect that interests him truly. Antonioni looks at the landscape through "technological eyes", trying to possess each time, at each movie, the most advanced shooting technique, as if it were the most appropriate way to observe what it is around him. The place has a privileged look, and this seems to say, after all, that it is what intensely involves us, influencing us more than anything else.
I certainly draw my subjects from nature, because in it there are dense plots, already so strong and autonomously beautiful, to result at each look profoundly new. Nature is capable to evoke images, something that photography can do in a different way: it is eye and water, immaterial and matter; it is mainly a means that in my research makes the gaze shareable, that removes mental images from an evanescent state, and also generates a multitude of impalpable and always new, thanks to this possibility of sharing.
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Caterina Morigi, Portrait ( production process - detail ), 2016
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M. Z., S. B.: We are interested in that boundary between copy and original and what triggers in this "closeness" in your works? And in comparison, what is condemned to succumb or perish? The invisible?
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C.M.: When you cannot see the original, the copy starts a series of imagined versions of it. The invisible is then created, not succumbed to. In the presence of the copy and the original the invisible is the connection between the two parts, a soft pad pulsating and silent, which evokes images and meaning: it is the poetic layer. Many experiments can be carried out by questioning the objects in this sense, testing the transparent elastic space between the copy and the original. If for the reproduction of an ancient city the copy succumbs in the proximity of the original, this may not be the case between a small porcelain sculpture and its poly-material original.
In the project Honesty of Matter - Sincerità della materia, that I realized in collaboration with Real Fabbrica in Capodimonte, the original is confused with the copy and the copy with the original, always in a different way. Porcelain is a precious material, difficult to work with, because it gives back enlarged, during the firing phase, the mistakes made during the modelling. To obtain the desired result it is necessary to work it in a wise way after a long experimentation; but the name of the project takes its cue also from the Neapolitan meaning of the term "sincerity": usually it is a fruit the one to be sincere, and when you bite it its beauty is reflected in the taste. The sculptures and originals will be placed in the space, creating references that are sometimes immediate - due to their proximity - and sometimes to be searched for intentionally. In the distance, or temporary absence, an expectation will be created in the one who observes and seeks, which will rarely reflect the expected.
In the relationship between visible and invisible, photography serves also to reveal: in Ex-voto and Lux et Lucus (Naples, 2019), I focus on the link between divinity and trauma. After a strong storm on the Real Bosco di Capodimonte in 2018, I decided to bring back, in an analogical way, the sky on earth. In Lux et Lucus I transfer the celestial vault to the lower part of the image, through a small mirror placed under the lens, to embody the ancient beliefs (which have left traces until the present) according to which, not only the rain and the wind fall from above, but also the divine response is based in a vortex of air that comes from the high and unreachable places where the gods lived. The prints are enclosed in a small wooden box of a tree fallen from the storm; they remain in contact with the fresh wood that slowly modifies them.
Ex-voto, on the other hand, takes up the forms of clay votive objects from the fourth century BC, which represent edible vegetables, very common in Magna Graecia. To recreate new objects, symbolic sculptures, I have mixed wood dust (wood, leaves, insects) with a semi-transparent material: wax, a technique used in the seventeenth century in Naples for anatomical-medical representations.
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Caterina Morigi, Lux et lucus, 2018 / Ex-voto, 2018
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M. Z., S. B.: Here we are doing a reconnaissance on the possibility of going beyond what has been probed so far with photography. We are therefore interested in understanding which further directions can be taken in the relationship between author, art and medium (in this case through photography). Can you also tell us about the inexistence of the innocent eye in this perspective of metaphotography? If "the gaze will always be influenced by one's own previous experience and charged with interpretation", how can one access another dimension, not subjective, that carries something that we do not yet know and that can offer the possibility of an unprecedented revelation?
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C.M.: The transparent images that photography evokes concern a mental memory: everything that has been observed previously, the places in which one lived, one's personal visual fixations, can be summed up in a sort of invisible and totally individual structure.
A few years ago I went in search of these traces, to remove them from the evanescent state in which they are normally found: in the series Seuils (Normandy and Brittany, 2014-2015) I question my eyes to make visible the structure formed by the imprints of the seen-lived. In 2014, after having lived in Venice for four years, I decided to experiment with a different, natural context, using a 50mm lens. Once back I observed the result: the vegetation was intertwined or gently combed, small and large craters blended into each other in the magma of the textures, they also exchanged wind and sea, foam and rock, everything that weighed with what flew. Depending on who observes these images, the interpretation given is different. It varies also the time of understanding.
Through the production of new images the photographer, or artist, reveals her/his own way of looking; but if you use new means, different languages, it will not be through the look that an artist will express her/himself, but through the choice of this different type of eye. In Portrait I entrusted the task of portraying nature to the machine, not because it was the most objective medium I could find, but because it was my "reference system". When the expressive potential comes out of control, because it is delegated to other hands as well as to other eyes, something unexpected is produced and the artist can re-read it.
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Caterina Morigi, Seuils ( detail ), 2014-2015
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M. Z., S. B.: We are asking you a question that we have already asked to those who use the scanner in a conceptual way. Is photography a sculpture? And we are also thinking of Portrait, where you select a scrap rock from the raw surface and have a stone copy made, through a long process of scanning the original and reproduction with a numerical control machine.
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C.M.: Photography is matter, not only because at a symbolic level it still wears the clothes of its origins, even though it no longer has a body; but because from digital photography can become matter again, for example with 3D printing, which can occur to put or take away, as in the case of Portrait, where starting from the virtual model (scanning) an artificial diamond tip sculpts, on a second square block, the natural shapes of the stone. My personal way of dealing with this issue is not to define the medium in a closed and defined way; banally photography does not mean camera, prints, frames, but it can easily be a scanner, a stone sculpture, an abandoned quarry. Yes, photography is a sculpture.
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M. Z., S. B.: Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, some painters projected encrypted visions into the landscape. They concealed in their augmented reality revealing messages and invisible presences, perceptible only through intuition. Leonardo advised painters to use the "hallucinatory" exercise of fixing the old walls made of different stones and full of lichens and mosses, to find inspiration for drawing forms from random images to be inserted in the landscaped subjects of the paintings.
Giotto, Dürer, Mantegna, Signorelli and other painters also used the evocative power of pareidolia. Piero di Cosimo and Leonardo carried out an exercise in vision, declining abstraction in the figure and vice versa, in an exchange of correlations and conceptual shifts. You seem to be an heir to this tradition. How has this imaginative possibility evolved further? What are the new questions that you have put into play with your work?
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C.M.: Pareidolia is an ancestral mechanism that affects perception. I dealt with this theme in Entre (Padua, 2016), comparing two images, one macro and one landscape, printed twice, respectively in very large and very small dimensions. Entering the room, the observer cannot immediately recognize what is depicted in the prints that cover the walls. The time of understanding is considerably extended, precisely because of the point of view in which s/he initially finds her/himself. Moving in space, after a series of attempts, s/he will be able to recognize some "human" elements; clinging to them, s/he will be able to bring the image back to the known reality.
Since I was a child, I have had a vision defect, perhaps due to special states of fatigue, which I struggle to control. It brings me to an alteration of the stereoscopy, increased and not diminished, as it usually happens. In these very moments the perception of places and people changes; its triggering has a lot to do with abstract textures and light. For a while I tried to understand what it was at a medical level with poor results; now I've given up, but I'm still interested in the scientific aspects of vision. My research is also moving in this direction.
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Caterina Morigi, Entre ( installation ), 2016
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Caterina Morigi, Entre ( detail ), 2016
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M. Z., S. B.: We ask you the well-known question that Giorgio Agamben asked himself and that we continue to ask ourselves cyclically: "Whose and what are we contemporary about?  What does it mean to be contemporary?"
Would you tell us about the compulsion between contemporary art and other disciplines with which you deal with? And in your research do you leave room for hybridization and the most interesting discoveries of science?
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C.M.: There is a difficult coincidence between being good artists and being understood in the present. Of course, there has always been a discrepancy between reflecting the tastes of the market and the critics, and becoming part of art history. But if contemporary art needs to provide its own vision of the world with images, the attempt to use a language that reaches the people of its time must be made (especially avoiding self-referential and excessive stratification).
A peculiarity that characterizes the last few years compared to the past is an almost mimetic effect of contemporary art with other disciplines, you can see an increasing hybridization, the opposite of the search for a pure art, you do not shy away from the mixing of things, rather it expects to be finally recognized to artistic experimentation to be an important contribution in other areas which approached (such as science) and not just a tribute to them.
For me it is important to choose, or at least to take into consideration, the most advanced technological means that we have at our disposal, because it is a way to maintain this connection, while looking back if necessary.
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Caterina Morigi, All' Eternar le Opere ( detail ), 2016
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Caterina Morigi
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METAFOTOGRAFIA
[05.10-03. - 11.2019]
Baco Contemporay Art association
V. Arena 9, Città Alta, Bergamo, Italy
https://www.bacoartecontemporanea.it
 
 
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