Rossella's Room of Silence

1.
The next trimester i would like to photograph more. I have not taken a single photograph in quite a long time. I don’t want to set specific limitations, I would like to be able to photograph simply for the sake of the act of photographing and producing images. I would also need to work more on my problem solving skills, as I often realize that I lack the cold-headedness necessary to address issues promptly.

2.
Fear is the ruling order of my life. It’s fear of anything, or of nothing. Primarily it’s fear of time. Of time’s altering powers, maybe of time running out, or something along these lines. This ruling sense of fear is what triggers and gives shape to what I do. At the same time this fear is a looming, encumbering presence weighing heavily on all my actions.

3.
The work Universal Time has been planned as divided in chapters, with each chapter functioning as a separate module, though connected thematically to all the rest. The first chapter, currently underway, is about the afterlife of iconic objects from historical, official and semi-official portraiture. The idea is creating images out of virtual replicas I am making of objects that feature more or less prominently in portraits of political leaders — heads of state and the like — and isolate them from their context, conferring to them an atemporal dimension, a great beyond, a nakedness of purpose and meaning. In the images the monochrome replica, deprived of any specific material quality and chalk-like, emerges like a ghostly specter from a neutral pitch black background and is lighted as to emphasize its character through its most basic physical components. Through the research on these objects, through the examination of their structural and metaphorical connotations, I am gaining a deeper understanding of what goes on behind structures of power, also on a philosophical level. Through its repurposed presence, the object becomes thus for me a gateway to something else.

4-5.
The still image is what I have been attached to for the longest time. It’s somewhat comfortable and captivating, at the same time it can feel limiting at times. That’s the reason for my recent drift towards the moving image and video making. It’s a very small change, to be sure, since I’m not willing to give up the fascination that the still image exercises on myself altogether. Working on moving images requires a different way of thinking, from planning things out to the construction of the image itself. There’s also a different language involved. I noticed for instance that for still images I tend to think more about formal aspects of the image, as composition, while in the moving image I am looking more at the rhythm of the whole. Rhythm is not only about the flow of the frames but about the interplay between them all, so not so much about elements being exact in themselves but rather being in vibrant communication with one another. This communication I found is hard to establish when any element is off in relation to the rest. Which means I have to keep an eye open in several directions at once and think about the purpose of the whole rather than the accuracy of each part. This incursion into the moving image offered an opportunity to explore some of my fixations under a new perspective — and to see if and how they hold under different circumstances.

6-7-8.
Currently I’m reading a work by Ian Reader on Aum Shinrikyō, the religious sect responsible for the attack to the metro of Tokyo in 1995 and of other lesser known — in the West, that is — atrocities. The work attempts to reconstruct the roots of the sect, analyzing especially the figure of its leader, Asahara Shōkō. By establishing connection between Aum’s historical development and interaction with its social and political environment, the book tries to underline motivations for its reliance on violence. According to the thesis of the writer, a relationship of reciprocal rejection between Aum and Japanese society and of their mutual values — on one side Aum’s rigid dualistic vision of reality and its shunning what it perceived as the hell-bent materialistic nature of society, on the other the external perception of Aum as a threatening and disruptive force pitted against common shared values — created a schism that only naturally resulted in open conflict between the two, with Aum falling prey to an entrenched mentality in which the sect unquestionably identified with the embodiment of good, being persecuted and having to fend for itself against the evil at work in the world. The book itself doesn’t have a direct connection with my work, but it addresses a certain personal fascination for the notions of violence and darkness in individuals, also in relation with their placement in society.

9.
Only recently I had occasion to get to know more in depth the films of Taiwanese director Tsai-ming Liang. The works are all interconnected somehow, as even when they are independent from one another, they truly feel part of a fluid and yet coherent universe. The stories of the films mostly revolve around common life in Taiwan, the alienation enveloping it, and the depiction of urban spaces as the metaphysical setting where this alienation becomes manifest. A level of absurdity is integral to the work, emphasizing the poetic dimension inherent to human experience, even in its most contradictory aspects. What intrigues me the most about Tsai-ming Liang’s body of work — and I mean not only the feature length films, but also the short ones — is their deliberate slow-pace, the way they resist the flowing of time, and the way this slowness is deeply informed by and intertwined with exploration of space.

10-11.
Even though the time and effort I devote to gaming has decreased drastically in recent years, video games are still a relevant influence in my work. More and more my interest in gaming has shifted towards the balance games establish between open and closed narrative, that is the possibility to leave space for players to explore story following their own terms, while retaining a certain degree of control over the experience offered — and the medium — on the part of the maker. This balance is often subtle in well-done games, but I find that even “bad” games have often ways of working it that are worth of consideration. Retaining story is relatively easy when a plot is clearly spelled out using traditional storytelling methods. It becomes trickier however when hypothetical viewers are invested with the task of constructing their own story and are supposedly being given the freedom to do so. For instance, I’ve tried experimenting before with open narratives in an online story generator, reducing the traditional story form to simple components and pairing it with the photographic medium by introducing a degree of randomness in the mix. The result was a simple website that randomly superimposed a short story and an image. None of these elements was self-exhaustive in its own and the readers were to imagine their own story by putting together the two. The result in that case however I found only partly satisfactory as I think the form could be refined further either by simplifying each element to its absolute basics or by adding new layers of investment for an audience to play with.