If I close my eyes I see the mountain
“Impossibile continuare senza di te,
impossibile non continuare senza di te”
Samuel Beckett
“Matrilineare
Dote primordiale
Distanza siderale potere
Potenza nucleare
Distanza siderale
Dote primordiale”
CSI
Photographic archives, both public and private, are a rich, fertile and welcoming land of refuge for anyone who has the need and the time to face the history and the stories that form it. Their reception, however, is ambiguous. They are (physically and metaphorically) complex and inhospitable places, full of pitfalls and subterfuges, lies and fictions, false truths and very solid lies. They are places where truth and lies go hand in hand, often dressed the same, and in which joy and pain coexist, together with memory and fiction.
If you want to venture into family archives, the feelings they provoke are often intensely contrasting. They are often places of meditation, melancholy and expiation, in which memory saves and condemns, moves and disturbs. Inside, stories are reconstructed based on the reflection of what has been experienced and told, sometimes undermining generations old truths – or presumed to be so. They are, more than anything else, places. Loaded with stories, stratifications and interactions like rain clouds – devoid of any neutrality, regardless of the thirst of those who live and research in them.
The most important question to ask yourself when dealing with archival images is who made them. This allows us to immediately include the gaze of the observer, the eye behind the viewfinder, in the process of understanding and reconstruction. Asking yourself who framed the shot, who these people were smiling at or not, who they were posing for, is an important step in being able to – at least – imagine who was holding the camera through the viewfinder. Or the knife by the handle.
D’Auria explains: “I analysed the photographs that I inherited, images dating from about 1800s onwards and I realised that most of the images portray women, women who were photographed by men, staging idealised happy lives, poses and family situations that are always similar. But what were these women thinking as they posed and looked at their father, their husband, or the professional photographer? What did they dream about before meeting their future partner and what did they dream about after? Did they keep doing it? Did they do it together? Did they dream together? Did they talk about their dreams? Of their expectations?”
“I close my eyes I see the mountain” is a project that does not start from the archive, but gets there, gets entangled in it and comes out changed. It’s s a project that talks about the dynamics of power in gender relations, the care of power, and the pain that power inflicts on the bodies and souls of those who suffer it – starting from Aline d’Auria’s mother, from her pain, and going back to her – passing on to the women who preceded her. The lives of these women, closely linked to each other and to the mountains of the upper Engadine, are narrated through photographs, diaries and objects present in the artist’s personal archive. These are shown and reinterpreted through the contemporary gaze of the artist, in a process of remediation and constant dialogue through the space of places and the time of memory.
The photographic narrative tightens and revolves around the atonement, the healing of the trauma that has been carried incessantly for generations. This is represented by a three-channel video staging a dance, a liberation of movements and bodies, of expectations and possible lives between three women in front of the sacred mountains of their stories. The bodies bind into each other as they bind with the mountain, for then freeing themselves into the chances of what could have been – the magic of a possible salvation. The performance acts as a salvific ritual, while the artist’s gaze bears witness to it, enhancing its power and repetition.
This video represents the core strength of the project, and is installed in the exhibition space so that the viewers find themselves surrounded in an embrace by the archival material and its remediations – as if all those energies had to be freed, and made flow towards a single point. The work of installing and creating the exhibition space itself becomes a fundamental part of the project, guiding its interpretation and allowing a restitution. The whole experience creates a powerful synergy of images and sounds, an embracing visual experience allowing the activation of an emotional response, an identification with the stories and experiences told – whatever role our history leads us to assume.
Elisa Medde, photography and visual culture scholar
October 2023
This project has been realised with the support of: Repubblica e Cantone Ticino Fondo Swisslos, Pro Helvetia, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Museo d’arte Mendrisio, Comune di Chiasso, Comune di Poschiavo
impossibile non continuare senza di te”
Samuel Beckett
“Matrilineare
Dote primordiale
Distanza siderale potere
Potenza nucleare
Distanza siderale
Dote primordiale”
CSI
Photographic archives, both public and private, are a rich, fertile and welcoming land of refuge for anyone who has the need and the time to face the history and the stories that form it. Their reception, however, is ambiguous. They are (physically and metaphorically) complex and inhospitable places, full of pitfalls and subterfuges, lies and fictions, false truths and very solid lies. They are places where truth and lies go hand in hand, often dressed the same, and in which joy and pain coexist, together with memory and fiction.
If you want to venture into family archives, the feelings they provoke are often intensely contrasting. They are often places of meditation, melancholy and expiation, in which memory saves and condemns, moves and disturbs. Inside, stories are reconstructed based on the reflection of what has been experienced and told, sometimes undermining generations old truths – or presumed to be so. They are, more than anything else, places. Loaded with stories, stratifications and interactions like rain clouds – devoid of any neutrality, regardless of the thirst of those who live and research in them.
The most important question to ask yourself when dealing with archival images is who made them. This allows us to immediately include the gaze of the observer, the eye behind the viewfinder, in the process of understanding and reconstruction. Asking yourself who framed the shot, who these people were smiling at or not, who they were posing for, is an important step in being able to – at least – imagine who was holding the camera through the viewfinder. Or the knife by the handle.
D’Auria explains: “I analysed the photographs that I inherited, images dating from about 1800s onwards and I realised that most of the images portray women, women who were photographed by men, staging idealised happy lives, poses and family situations that are always similar. But what were these women thinking as they posed and looked at their father, their husband, or the professional photographer? What did they dream about before meeting their future partner and what did they dream about after? Did they keep doing it? Did they do it together? Did they dream together? Did they talk about their dreams? Of their expectations?”
“I close my eyes I see the mountain” is a project that does not start from the archive, but gets there, gets entangled in it and comes out changed. It’s s a project that talks about the dynamics of power in gender relations, the care of power, and the pain that power inflicts on the bodies and souls of those who suffer it – starting from Aline d’Auria’s mother, from her pain, and going back to her – passing on to the women who preceded her. The lives of these women, closely linked to each other and to the mountains of the upper Engadine, are narrated through photographs, diaries and objects present in the artist’s personal archive. These are shown and reinterpreted through the contemporary gaze of the artist, in a process of remediation and constant dialogue through the space of places and the time of memory.
The photographic narrative tightens and revolves around the atonement, the healing of the trauma that has been carried incessantly for generations. This is represented by a three-channel video staging a dance, a liberation of movements and bodies, of expectations and possible lives between three women in front of the sacred mountains of their stories. The bodies bind into each other as they bind with the mountain, for then freeing themselves into the chances of what could have been – the magic of a possible salvation. The performance acts as a salvific ritual, while the artist’s gaze bears witness to it, enhancing its power and repetition.
This video represents the core strength of the project, and is installed in the exhibition space so that the viewers find themselves surrounded in an embrace by the archival material and its remediations – as if all those energies had to be freed, and made flow towards a single point. The work of installing and creating the exhibition space itself becomes a fundamental part of the project, guiding its interpretation and allowing a restitution. The whole experience creates a powerful synergy of images and sounds, an embracing visual experience allowing the activation of an emotional response, an identification with the stories and experiences told – whatever role our history leads us to assume.
Elisa Medde, photography and visual culture scholar
October 2023
This project has been realised with the support of: Repubblica e Cantone Ticino Fondo Swisslos, Pro Helvetia, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Museo d’arte Mendrisio, Comune di Chiasso, Comune di Poschiavo