Across the Margins

Correspondences

By Giuliana Laportella to Vito Riviello, the landscapes of passage that traversed them.

Premise

[ Dialogue of the Minimal Systems ]

“Due to lesser forces, Vito and I begin the dialogue from those minimal systems that sustain the world.”

The idea was born from a nocturnal and exhaustive trill on December 24, 2007.

(fragment from a notebook)

The Correspondences project originates from a friendship. Between affinities of spirit and creative exchanges, these are deep dialogues between a poet and a photographer.

And if friendship also implies a willingness to communicate, to meet, to know, then this knowing reveals a collaboration which, for the two of us, became a complicity aimed at the cross-fertilization of personalities and arts — a search among the parts, a vehicle of “a constant hypothesis of a group in progress, of multimedia culture,” the “chamber” laboratory (so named by Vito Riviello and Giuliana Laportella) Creative Excipients.

In the wordplay and imagery that have always characterized my photographic themes, the encounter with Vito — poet in art and in life — was a singular combination. While I wandered through his verses, he observed, as if leaning out a window, my landscapes of passage.

In every artist’s inventory, there are always some projects left unfinished. From the encounter between photography and poetry emerged the translation of the photophonemes into verse.

Photophonemes are a bivalent correspondence; they differ only by a phoneme, that is, they serve to distinguish the “minimal pairs” of techniques. Photophonemes are a linguistic path of word/image, where the phoneme is the distinguishing unit of expressive languages which, mirrored and opposed, constitute the missing sound of an image and the framing of a word.

Photophonemes “reflect” upon the perceptions of an idea through parallel signs, signals of forms that become content.

Every encounter marks a story, but dealing with History is like having to make History; making helps to think, and thinking helps to create.

Landscapes of Passage, photophonemes by Giuliana Laportella, translated by Vito Riviello, operate along a path, and a “use” of photography that engages the field of aesthetic inquiry, where the image presents itself as a narrative Surreal [Su[L]real] writing following the syntactic constructions of discourse. A dialogue, opposed yet complementary, that becomes a project, an investigation between poetry and image, between photography/word, as a search for harmony.

“Poetry is a declaration already dialectically exposed to all the intemperances of grammar and syntax.”

(Vito Riviello, excerpt from the discourse on Photophonemes, during the photographic exhibition Landscapes of Passage, Libreria fuori le mura, S. Lorenzo, Rome, January 2007).

Photography subjects the unforeseen of orderly seeing to light and shadow, decomposing and deconstructing the proportions of the “real.”