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. Can this be considered ambition? Perhaps not.

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 it’s 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. 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. 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 the 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.