Elena Damiani talks about her work
Saturday, February 9, 2019Translation:
My name is Elena Damiani and I’ll speak about my work Fading Field No. 4. In 2013, when I did this piece, I was working with memory and landscape. I dedicated a good bit of time to searching for images from different sources, both physical and digital. At first, I didn’t necessarily search for anything in particular, but little by little I collected material that began to construct a universe of meaningful images. The classification of this material responds to two fundamental criteria, according to content and possible use. Each element acquires meaning within a system in which structures emerge from the ways images correspond to each other. While I worked on new projects, this system continued to expand with the appearance of new connections and narrative lines, at the same time adjusting itself via a process of filtering material that did not maintain its relevance within the complex visual plurality of this content. In recent years this constellation of images has become a tool for work and an inventory of references and formal interests in my practice. The preoccupation with creating coherent organization from this great quantity of visual content that surrounds us is added to my interest in reactivating the evocative capacity of the images so that they recover meaning. I found something very close to my own memories of places and specific moments in this collection. At the same time, I want to think that it is universal and that it possesses the capacity to resonate in the collective memory. A large part of this collection is made up of photographs of landscapes that document natural phenomena and that show the strength of an ever-changing nature. This is the case with the material I used for the series Fading Field, in which photographs of geological processes fuse with views of remote locations to give way to landscapes that converge with the space that surrounds the work.