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Giuliana Prucca/Avarie Publishing will be in Rome for a workshop at D.O.O.R. on May 13-14 2017. The workshop title and essay will be:
Di – statiche – trasformazioni: dall’immagine-tempo allo spazio-libro.
Laboratorio di ricerca, studio e riflessione intorno all’ideazione del libro d’artista, a partire dall’analisi dei mo(vi)menti che lo fondano: cinema, performance, fotografia, scrittura.
(Research, studio and thinking lab about the creation of a book of artist, starting from the analysis of the movements at the base of it: cinema, performance, photography, writing)
Researcher in literature and visual arts, Giuliana Prucca founded in 2012 the independent publishing house Avarie in Paris, specializing in art books that explore, with a transversal approach, the relationship between writing and image.
Since her first publications, Position(s) by photographer Antoine d’Agata and I do not want to disappear silently into the night by collagiste Katrien de Blauwer, she aims at deepening the concept of emptiness and its visibility, showing the artistic process as a form of body’s resistance and as a trace of disappearance.
Author of the essay Antonin Artaud. Evocations picturales plastiques et dans les années écrits des Vingt, she edited and translated books on Artaud and d’Agata, writings by Yves Klein and the catalogue Gina Pane.
Professor of image analysis and butoh performer, she writes for magazines about photography and contemporary art (The Eyes and Nafas) and she collaborated with multimedia festival Exit in Créteil and with ICS Tre and Sicilia Queer Festival in Palermo for the event Visioni e percorsi in Antoine d’Agata.
She curated the exhibitions: I do not want to disappear / silently into the night adapted from the book with Katrien de Blauwer for the festival Fotoleggendo 2015, organized by Officine Fotografiche in collaboration with Lina Pallotta, and Noctiluca for the gallery NOPX which aimed at establishing a dialogue between the artists published by Avarie and was included in the framework of The Others Fair 2015 at the former prisons Le Nuove during Artissima, the international contemporary art fair in Turin.
She held presentations and projections at the Museo d’Arte in Lugano, the Triennale di Milano, the festivals Obiettivo Donna, Fotoleggendo and Visioni fuori Raccodo in Rome, the bookshops and art spaces Monte-en-l’air in Paris, Amantes and Spazio B in Turin, Officine Fotografiche in Rome. She took part in several art or photo book festivals and independent publishing fairs, such as Paris Photo, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Unseen Amsterdam, Wiels Art Book Fair in Brussels, MIA in Milan, Lisbon’s Photobook Fair, Bitume FotoFest in Lecce, Volumes Independent Art Publishing Fair in Zurich.
Avarie’s publications were exhibited at PhotoIreland/The Library Project, Zine of the Zone, Athens Photo Festival, Archipelago London, Umbria World Fest, Photobookshow in Kiev, The Smell of Dust in Arles, whereas I do not want to disappear / silently into the night by Katrien de Blauwer was shortlisted for the Author Book Award at the festival Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles.
She lives and does research between Paris and Berlin.
Dottore di ricerca in letteratura francese e arti visive, Giuliana Prucca ha fondato nel 2012 a Parigi la casa editrice indipendente Avarie (Artbooks Vuoti A Rendere International Edition), specializzata in libri d’arte e fotografia che esplorano con approccio trasversale la relazione tra scrittura e immagine.
Fin dalle prime pubblicazioni, Position(s) del fotografo Magnum Antoine d’Agata, I do not want to disappear silently into the night della collagiste Katrien de Blauwer e From static oblivion dell’artista concettuale e performativo Ion Grigorescu, intende approfondire il concetto di visibilità del vuoto, mostrando il processo artistico quale forma di resistenza del corpo e traccia della scomparsa.
Autrice del saggio Antonin Artaud. Evocations picturales et plastiques dans les écrits des années Vingt, ha curato e tradotto libri sull’opera di Artaud e d’Agata, gli scritti di Yves Klein e il catalogo Gina Pane edito da Actes Sud. Docente di analisi dell’immagine e performer butoh, scrive per alcune riviste di fotografia e arte contemporanea (The Eyes e Nafas).
Ha collaborato con il festival multimediale Exit di Créteil e con la galleria Ics Tre e il Sicilia Queer Festival di Palermo per l’evento Visioni e percorsi in Antoine d’Agata. Ha curato le mostre: I do not want to disappear / silently into the night tratta dal libro con Katrien de Blauwer per il festival Fotoleggendo 2015, organizzato da Officine Fotografiche in collaborazione con la fotografa e docente Lina Pallotta, e Noctiluca per la galleria NOPX che intendeva instaurare un dialogo espositivo tra gli artisti pubblicati da Avarie e s’inseriva nell’ambito della quinta edizione di The Others Fair 2015 presso l’Ex-Carcere Le Nuove di Torino durante la fiera internazionale d’arte contemporanea Artissima.
Ha tenuto presentazioni-proiezioni presso il Museo d’Arte di Lugano, la Triennale di Milano, i festival Obiettivo Donna e Fotoleggendo di Roma, le librerie e spazi d’arte Monte-en-l’air di Parigi, Amantes e Spazio B di Torino, Officine Fotografiche di Roma. Ha partecipato a diverse fiere e festival di fotografia ed editoria indipendente, tra cui Paris Photo, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Unseen Amsterdam, Wiels Art Book Fair di Bruxelles, MIA di Milano, Lisbon’s Photobook Fair, Bitume FotoFest di Lecce, Volumes Independent Art Publishing Fair di Zurigo.
Le pubblicazioni di Avarie sono state esibite a PhotoIreland/The Library Project, Zine of the Zone, Athens Photo Festival, Archipelago London, Umbria World Fest, Photobookshow in Kiev, The Smell of Dust in Arles, mentre I do not want to disappear / silently into the night di Katrien de Blauwer è stato selezionato tra i finalisti del Premio Libro d’Autore del festival Les Rencontres de la Photographie di Arles.
Vive e ricerca tra Parigi e Berlino.
POSITION(S)
ANTOINE D’AGATA
„ I want that! That what? That. But what? That. To be there, to be the strongest, to be here, getting through wholly, warding off nothing, devouring all, above all eating, before going back to the absolute void. „
„ Voglio questo! Questo cosa? Questo. Ma cosa? Questo. Essere qui, essere il più forte, esserci pienamente, non respingere nulla, divorare ogni cosa, mangiare prima di tutto, prima di tornare nel vuoto assoluto. „
Antonin Artaud
This project, conceived and executed by Giuliana Prucca with the photographer’s approval and close collaboration, seeks to depict Antoine d’Agata’s quest – “the inexorable course from void to void”. With thoughtful stylistic choices, accurate studies on contents and a particular attention to the quality of subjects and materials, Giuliana Prucca introduces her activity as indipendent publisher specialised in international art and photo books. For this purpose, she would like to distinguish Position(s) from other publications and catalogues of Antoine d’Agata and make the book a creation in itself, which however doesn’t disassociate aesthetics from experience and meaning, thus considering the photographic practice first and foremost as an existential choice and a form of resistance. The book is composed as a montage of texts and pictures, where words, sometimes descriptive, sometimes poetic, intersect with images in a narrative continuity. It combines the most concrete and significant examples of Antoine d’Agata’s activity with his more abstract body of thought following a process of inclusion which is already apparent in the photographer’s approach to life and art and which often translates into serial images and sequences “with neither beginning nor ending” and into a series of references, echoes and word repetitions. The book’s graphic form seeks to reflect the meaning of d’Agata’s research which paradoxically leads toward the subject’s disappearance and the ego’s negation within the neutral spectrum of the image while insisting on an intimate involvement with its subject and a perfect amalgamation of art and life. It thereby places photography in the context of anonymity which is that of universal expression.
Il progetto, concepito e composto da Giuliana Prucca con l’approvazione e il supporto del fotografo, vuole rendere conto del percorso di Antoine d’Agata – “il corso inesorabile dal vuoto verso il vuoto”. Attraverso una precisa scelta stilistica, uno studio accurato dei contenuti e una particolare attenzione alla qualità dei soggetti e dei materiali, Giuliana Prucca presenta la propria attività di editore indipendente specializzato in libri d’arte e fotografia. Vorrebbe in tal modo distinguere Position(s) dalle altre pubblicazioni di Antoine d’Agata e fare del libro una creazione in sé che non separi tuttavia l’estetica dall’esperienza e dal significato e consideri la pratica fotografica innanzitutto una scelta esistenziale e una forma di resistenza. Il libro si costruisce sul montaggio di testi e di foto, in cui la scrittura, ora descrittiva, ora poetica, s’intreccia all’immagine in una continuità narrativa. Si tratta di coniugare gli esempi più concreti e significativi dell’attività fotografica di Antoine d’Agata alla sua riflessione più astratta secondo un processo d’inclusione già all’opera nell’approccio del fotografo alla vita e all’arte che si traduce spesso in immagini seriali e sequenze “senza inizio, né fine” e in una serie di rimandi, echi e ripetizioni di parole.
La forma grafica vuole rispecchiare il senso della ricerca di d’Agata che, proprio attraverso una partecipazione intima alla propria materia, un’aderenza totale di arte e vita, si dirige paradossalmente verso la scomparsa del soggetto e l’annullamento dell’io nella neutralità dell’immagine, iscrivendo così la fotografia nell’anonimato di un’espressione universale.
I do not want to disappear silently into the night
Kathrien de Blauwer
„ Nothing. The spot is an empty passageway between two buildings, empty of everything but emptiness. „
„ Niente. Il punto è un varco fra due edifici vuoto, vuoto di tutto meno che di vuoto. „
Michelangelo Antonioni
Through KDB’s <collages> and their <short circuit> effect in our ways of seeing, the book intends to explore and deepen the concept of <void> and its <visibility>, proposing a work that’s situated at the border of different artistic disciplines, from <photography> to <cinema> to <performance> and to <painting>. <Photographer without a camera>, KDB collects and re-uses pictures and supports from old magazines and papers, engaging them in a vision that occurs directly in the <hand>, becoming thereby more physical and tactile.
KDB gives new meaning and life to what is <residual>, saving the images from destruction and including them in a new narration that combines <intimacy> and <anonymity>. Hers is therefore a work about <memory>, although never by a process of accumulation but by way of <substraction>. The images are deprived of something that disappears from view but remains perceptible and refers to a kind of entirety. The collage itself is a signal that’s <present and resistant>, the <form of an emptiness> that is hence never <absence>. KDB’s work calls to mind the techniques of <photomontage> or <film editing>, using the <cut> as <border> or <frame> that determines what is visible and <essential>. Keeping in mind the collages’ highly <cinematographic> content, the book takes therefore inspiration from <Michelangelo Antonioni>’s filmic sensitivity, along with a few suggestions from the arts, that share his <pure, geometric and linear vision>. Like the Italian director, whose “interest – according to John Berger – is always <beside> the event shown”, Avarie has been trying to focus its attention on the <unseen> elements of the collages, such as the cut-out photographs and words from KDB’s notebooks or the reverse side of the support papers. In particular, the <off-screen> position of the texts in the book allows to frame the collages <in-between>: the void actually specifies itself as an <interstice>. KDB’s <text-fragments> – <sharp, precise and evocative> as <scripts> – interact with Antonioni’s writing which inhabits the book’s interstitial spaces: the extracts here inserted derive from what he himself defined as <films I wrote>, series of <unfinished stories> he never found the chance to shoot. Texts therefore, that belong not less to the order of <visualizations of the absent> as they render perfectly perceivable an image that doesn’t exist.
Grazie al cortocircuito che i collages di Katrien De Blauwer provocano nel sistema rappresentativo, il libro I do not want to disappear / silently into the night vuole esplorare e approfondire il tema del vuoto e della sua visibilità proponendo un lavoro al confine tra diverse discipline artistiche, dalla fotografia al cinema, dalla performance alla pittura.
Fotografa senza macchina fotografica, Katrien De Blauwer raccoglie e riutilizza immagini e supporti ritagliati da vecchie riviste e giornali, coinvolgendoli in una visione che avviene direttamente nella mano, e diventa così più fisica e materica. L’artista dà nuovo significato e vita al residuale, salva le immagini dalla distruzione e le trasmette in una nuova narrazione, che unisce al contempo intimità e anonimato. Il suo è dunque un lavoro sulla memoria, che però non è mai un processo di accumulo, ma di sottrazione.
Usando il taglio come confine o cornice che determina ciò che è visibile ed essenziale, la pratica di De Blauwer ricorda la tecnica del fotomontaggio o del montaggio cinematografico. Il libro s’ispira dunque, nella sua costruzione, alla sensibilità di Antonioni, passando per alcune suggestioni pittoriche che ne condividono la visione pura, geometrica e lineare. Come il regista, il cui interesse si colloca sempre a lato dell’evento mostrato, esso porta una particolare attenzione agli elementi invisibili e fuoricampo dei collage, quali il retro dei supporti o le fotografie e le parole ritagliate e incollate dall’artista nei propri diari personali, un tentativo anch’essi di visualizzare l’assenza.
„ Gazing at things radically, to the point of their exhaustion. „
Roland Barthes
From Static Oblivion
Ion Grigorescu
„ There is no inside, no mind, no outside, no conscience, nothing but the body as one sees it, a body that doesn’t cease to be, even when the eye drops who sees it. And this body is a fact. It’s me. „
Antonin Artaud
From static oblivion aims to deepen, starting from Ion Grigorescu’s rich production, the reflection about the status of the image as a balance of forces in tension, as form of what is in continuous movement and as a paradoxical act of cancellation of the body through its own representation. In the work of the Romanian artist, as in the book, the body is continually shown in different ways – from photography to film, from performance to drawing – and yet it remains absent, obscuring its own identity in an attempt to question the collective one. As it is impossible to carry out his performances and show his art during the regime, it ends up hiding, disappearing inside the image. Instead of showing, the image conceals, because it is non-documentary and non-transmittable; nevertheless, it is constitutive and executive, it is an act of birth, a prove of the artist’s resistance, especially as a human being inside (or against) any geographical or historical background. There is no art, says Deleuze, without release of a life force: in the rituals of his gestures and in the symbolism of his performances, Grigorescu finds a way to stay alive, preserving his own intellectual status while also defending the dignity of everyday life. From static oblivion traces, with spiral movements, the progression, both expansive and inclusive, of Grigorescu’s work, which, at the end, inscribes itself into the space of the body and into that of the world, in a complete superimposition of micro and macrocosm. Grigorescu absorbs elements of the surrounding reality, showing us a continuity between art and life, an interplay between work and work space: his act of dissidence is not an outcry of provocation, nor is it extreme; it is an anti-aesthetic operation which uses experimentation and rough techniques to uncover the fiction of art and to denounce the artifice of representation. Like a line that gradually takes on volume, Ion Grigorescu’s body transforms itself from eye to lens until it becomes screen or page onto which internal and external visions are projected, converting itself from a subject taking photographs into an object that’s being photographed. Like the narrative of an “imago”, the parable of the body traces a return not to the body itself but to its image. The body “loses body” in the image, it deserts, it abstracts itself, and makes thereby, in a transitive way, each image abstract. In an attempt to meld the conceptual and minimalist orientation of Grigorescu’s work with the secret practice of body art, the book tries to “temper” its own, deeply organic and poetic, content by placing it in a more geometric and epic framework. Ion Grigorescu’s actions, naked in front of the mirror or in front of the camera, come with a transcription of his nocturnal dreams from the 1970s and 80s which feature elements of the political and historical situation he was at the time confronted with. Questions of gender and of sexual identity caused by such “performative-photographic” work go hand in hand with doubts over an identification with the forces in power and with fears of an influence of propagandist elements entering dreams. Grigorescu worked in the secrecy of his studio, defying prohibitions and risking denunciations, thereby showing that art can be a universe which is freer than the world of dreams and which is capable of representing the true space of desire as a critical category and of affirming the image as an instrument of a subversive power. The layout of the book and the sequencing of the photographs follow a series of reiterations, where the repeated image slightly differs from the preceding one in terms of perspective, temporality and technique. Besides, many elements of the book are often taken out of larger figurative compositions and therefore capable of conveying a continuous sense of déjà-vu and of forcing the reader to stop and to move back and forth inside the volume, engaging him in a reading that is just as performative. Some of the films’ sequences are assembled in a specular way to allow, from the beginning, for a crossover-mirroring between artist and reader. Throughout the corpus of the book, a series of descriptive texts captioning the artist’s drafts, drawings and lithographies call again for an active participation of the reader who in turn can make the book “happen” every time as if it were an event or the 25th image of a film, the inexistent or ghost image which results from a break (“Avarie” in French) of the film strip and which we made visible in this book.