Providence | Videoinstallation

This exhibition takes its inspiration from the symbolic figure of Francesca Woodman and its predominant idea is a reflection on autobiography, the limit and the “threshold”.

Woodman’s work struck me because she knew how to combine autobiography with experiments in light in order to create unusual and evocative images: her body is camouflaged symbiotically within or by surfaces left abandoned and eroded by time and where doors and openings in her existential landscapes offer glimpses or hints of interior space.

Although my face does not appear, my work is also autobiographical. Movement in time is determined by swift changes in light and space and revolves around the idea of the door as a threshold standing not only in an aesthetic dimension in the photographic image, but also appearing as the idea of speed and contemporaneity in a changing socio-environmental landscape (moving, for example, from the view of a factory to a library to a domestic kitchen). Where Woodman’s doors are outlined on a cinematic frame or burst into the space of a room (Untitled, Providence, 1976), in my sequences doors open onto unexpected and contrasting landscapes that force the viewer to a sudden change of perspective and emotional response.

It is predominantly a working method in which light continually changes as if one were moving at right angles through the grid of an American city or a Metro line and into a topography of facial expressions.

It takes nothing for a revelatory moment to happen in an epiphany of impossible equilibrium, the feeling that something in the world’s continuous flux has come to a stop. The world and the landscape are no longer a single object, but fragments of “illumination” gathered together in different visual trajectories.

The door therefore occupies a central part in my work and allows for different visual perspectives that reflect change and leap over invisible barriers between “exterior and interior” and imaginary space.

My work here starts from these considerations: it is primarily based on light, on the body/hidden face as autobiography, on space (including social space) and on the revelatory relationship between the visible and invisible and into changing spaces of light.

A digital loop will be shown where brief clips of doors open onto “landscapes” that contrast either in setting or light.

Accompanying the video installation is a sequence of photographs on the theme of the threshold as a symbol and a site of transition.

Light/landscape/expression/autobiography are some of the focus points in my work.

Videoinstallation, photo | Fiorella Iacono

Set-up | Luca Monzani

Thanks to | NS Thompson, Clelia Bertoni, Stefano Massari, Andrea Gibellini