Flowing dreamlike memories
Fabiola Naldi
We all, without exception, live in a world composed of multiple levels of communication and comprehension: an ensemble of ever lighter and more imperceptible inter-related spaces which, at the same time, modify every external perception, however small. What we live, what we have direct or indirect experience of, what is shown to us through various cultural plans, more commonly known as the collective imagination, increasingly leads to alienation, to a distancing from the public dimension, and an attempt to retreat both physically and emotionally into a hidden private world.
Photography often comes to our aid in an effort to rediscover ourselves by bearing witness to the fast flow of experience, of the past and our consequent rapport with the world around us. The “settings” in Cecilia Luci’s photographs therefore become not only declarations of photographic truthfulness (according to what the perennially renowned Roland Barthes tells us in his classic text on photography), but also possible solutions in a parallel dimension just as real as its subsequent visual transposition. What has happened for more than a century in the sphere of photographic illusion is a synergy of interacting opposites, an aesthetic collaboration between two realities.
If we consider the photographic image as an outline of the real, something that has effectively been, we can then affirm that the object to which we turn our attention does, in any case, arise from a tangible experience, even though that very suggestion leaves room for an illusory component.
The photographic image thus oscillates between two stable and definite positions, the real and the unreal, hiding its identity in each position and giving rise to possible references to a past hidden by the flow of time just as much as by the conscious layer of existence.
The objects in suspension, floating, the transposition of an intimate quality that is revealed and is not disclosed mean that Cecilia Luci’s photographs appear as the paraphrasis of another dimension: a statute of the private, the personal, which the artist sees as a chance to explore the “sustainable lightness of being”, but also an opportunity to lead the spectator through the twists and turns of her own intimate world.
Cecilia Luci’s own private influences from her esoteric anthroposophical studies on Rudolf Steiner, to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s seminars on the Tarot and psychogenealogy, and her fortunate encounter with Bert Hillinger’s systemic family constellations, come together in an approach that is both shamanic and at the same time psychological, looking at the unconscious life and the ramifications of family. All these influences are to be seen in her photographs that seem so obscure and mysterious, and mark the point of departure for an understanding of her work. It is impossible not to take into consideration her own personal life experience, almost a visual journey in reverse not only into tangible memory, but also into that oneiric world where the sediment of desires, apprehensions and revisitations of one’s own being and becoming are laid down.
The individual experiences of the author undergo a visual metamorphosis precisely in the choice of photographic transposition: much of her artistic practice appears to be a sort of headlong rush towards a past disguised by the lived experience and the passage of time. The evidence of the conscious-subconscious-unconscious relationship cannot be denied, reflected as it is in the photographic transcriptions and that literally serves to connect the journey back into one’s own personal world and the visual contrast developed through the expedient of water understood as a vibrant vital liquid in constant transformation.
It is precisely the constant development of traits of one’s intimate and personal past that modifies the system inside the memory itself through photographic development. It is as if the “mechanical” taking of the photograph can be understood as instrumental in repositioning facts, places, people and emotions. Here, the water, understood as a primordial flow of energy, takes on a fundamental role in Cecilia Luci’s photographs: the ambivalence of the various parts translated into photograph determine the evolution of a pulsating, rippling unconscious.
In the same way, the “places” obtained by means of the sensual relationship between the objects, the liquid and the photography lead the spectator’s (and in this case also the reader’s) memory to the non-place theorized by the French anthropologist Marc Augé in 1993. The term defines two complementary but quite distinct concepts: on one hand, spaces constructed for a very specific purpose (usually related to transport, transit, commerce, free time and relaxation) and on the other, the relationship that is created between individuals and these spaces. Non-places are, in contrast to anthropological places, all those places that do not contribute to creating identity or any relational aspects of our lives. They are large public areas where the paths of millions of individuals might cross without establishing any sort of relationship either with others or with these very contained spaces that shape our daily lives.
On the surface there would appear to be nothing further from Cecilia Luci’s work: however, if we really wanted to reflect on the place/non-place distinction we would undoubtedly describe that precise mental area that is defined in the opposition between place and space. A space is an area of action that is experienced in the opposite way to a place, defined as the manifestation of a precise ideal area.
I don’t want to take this much further: these few reflections are enough to take us together into the places where Cecilia Luci sets her photographic visions. We do, however, find ourselves before a clear intention to draw into oneself, absorb or underline an area of action in which stasis carries the memesis and silence of suspension. This is something we often find in Cecilia Luci‘s processuality.
As the photographic medium has always taught us, it is a question of fixing something as private as it is recognizable. The result is a perceptible shift in the imaginary atmosphere held in check by the photographic release of the shutter. Immediately the other-place staged by Cecilia Luci is changed into an existing example of new “setting” in which the dream of the “memento” becomes concrete.
In other words the water used as a suspensory act of present action can become a sort of still image in which the artist’s intention anticipates the displacement of meaning and time. The result is an evocative setting capable of defining the perfect subtext of a new state of contemplation: her photographic “centres” become a new physical dimension also understood as the definition of a hypothetical and plausible emotional journey.
We are dealing with a constant shared presence of details that suspend the new photographic construction in an imaginary flowing drift. The photographs staged by Cecilia Luci move unconsciously in this autonomous space, fed by shifts in meaning and noisy silences.
Zygmunt Bauman affirms that humanity actually lives in an asymmetric world, where what happens at a local level has repercussions globally. We are in thrall to vulnerability in all its many facets and nobody, including the cultural critic who attempts a comparative reading, is excluded. Bauman maintains the existence of a liquid identity, in the grip of discomfort and uncertainty, identified as the direct consequence of the aesthetic, economic, and political conventions of which we are all victims. There is no real way out but the artist, once again, takes it upon herself to recount what dramatically unites us (this is the only true globalization that is happening) with the same attitude of an anthropologist of the present able to accumulate and learn as much as possible, battling against the culture of disengagement, discontinuity and forgetfulness. In her photographic work Cecilia Luci is certainly committed to delving into her own existence but, slowly, by virtue of the validated photographic medium, the private resurfaces in the collective thus making a similar journey possible for the collective sphere.